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Chapter 5 - "Your New Master"
Serenity hung loosely to Jake as the two followed Grace inside. Stopping in the dusty, decrepit kitchen, the oldest Angel called, "Girls, come here." She waited patiently for a moment, but when a minute had passed without any response from the other Angels, Grace strode to the doorway and called again.
"Just give us a second," Seraph said. "That boy's not going anywhere with Serenity all over him."
Jake's eyes grew wide, and he turned his head quickly to the blue-haired Angel at his side. "How can she see us when she's not even in the same room?" he asked, frightened and confused.
"She can hear us," Serenity said, simply. "We Angels have pretty good ears."
Grace turned to the boy with a grin. "She's being modest. We can hear a good two hundred yard radius without trouble. Lucie could get to three-fifty."
Jake gaped at the older Angel, shocked. "How...?"
"I dunno," Grace said, shrugging. "But that's not the only thing that makes Angels better than normal humans. Seraph wasn't kidding when she said you weren't going anywhere, Serenity could probably hold you to that spot in her sleep."
Serenity smiled slyly at Jake, who eyed her warily before turning back to Grace and seeing, out of the corner of his eye, movement in the next room. Focusing on the doorway, he could see the other Angels walking across the bare, warped wood floor. As they entered the kitchen, he asked, "Are you all Angels, too?"
"What do you think?" Seraph asked, flashing her wings as she stared the boy down. "Honestly, Grace, I don't know what you're thinking, this kid becoming our 'master'."
"Kid? He's two years older than you," Serenity said, almost angry.
With a short laugh, the young Angel stepped toward Jake and, staring him dead in the eye, asked, "Have you ever had someone try to kill you?" The boy shook his head. "Have you ever been kidnapped and chained to a wall? Beaten until it hurt to cry?" Again, he shook his head. "Have you ever been forced to take a knife to your friend, and told to kill her?"
Jake, too stunned and frightened to speak, shook his head and tried to back away, but Serenity stood firm. "No," he choked out, the young Angel's piercing glare unavoidable. "No."
"Then you're not older than me," Seraph said, her voice low but strong. She turned to Serenity, her eyes still fiery, and said, "And you. Why do you care about this, this -" she took a moment to find the right word, "idiot?"
Miracle, with a small sigh, sat against the wall near where Grace stood. All eyes turned to her, instantly, wondering if she would speak again. "Do we have a plan?" she asked, her voice sounding tired.
"I think so," Grace said. "We - Serenity, Jake and I - thought that maybe he could pose as a Chaser. He would pretend we were his Angels, and-"
Seraph laughed loudly, cutting the older Angel off. "There's no way this kid is going to be my master, not if-"
"Shut up," Serenity said, her voice dark. "If you have a better idea, I'm all ears."
With Seraph silenced, Grace continued. "So, Jake would pretend we were his Angels, and either find some way to provide for us, or find some way for us as a group to make money."
"Well, how did Lucie make money?" Seraph asked, curious. "I mean, we never worked, and she was home most of the time."
"Was she a bank robber?" Jake asked, trying to put himself in the conversation again. After a short moment of silence, the girls turned to him, staring as if he had two heads. "Stupid idea?"
Grace shook her head. "All right, we'll figure this out. Seraph, Miracle, take Bright out back and work on her with flying. I doubt she's spent much time in the air."
When the younger girls had left the house, Serenity turned to Grace. "Let's go upstairs to talk. We'll go to the quiet room."
"Quiet room?" Jake asked.
As the three walked through the adjoining rooms, crossing through Lucie's bedroom and bathroom, Grace explained that when Serenity had been captured, the black-winged Angel had decided she needed a room where someone could speak, but no one outside of the room could hear. Lucie had put Serenity in the room with Grace the day it had been finished, arming the older Angel with a meat cleaver and ordering her to either kill the blue-haired Angel or make her subservient.
"So Lucie goes there a lot?" Jake asked, still not completely clear on the purpose of the room. "Why?"
Serenity shrugged. "We've wondered about that. She used to go there two or three times a day. It was a lot more often after Seraph and Miracle came, and none of us have been in there for a year."
"She might be working up there," Grace said. "She muttered a lot about keeping her investments safe, and said one day she left all her money in the bank."
Jake nodded, concentrating on the rotted floorboards so as not to fall through a weak section of wood. Suddenly, he walked into Serenity, his head brushing past her cheek. He stepped back quickly, his face growing red with embarrassment as the blue-haired Angel, smiling sweetly, put her hands on her hips. "S-sorry," he said.
Serenity giggled. "See, if you had done that on purpose, I would've commended you for your bravery. Walking into someone like that, especially where your hands almost ended up, could get you killed."
Flustered, Jake's response left his mouth as a garbled mess. Satisfied, Serenity turned to the older Angel, who was standing stoically with her hand on the doorknob of a new, solid steel door. "Are you two done yet?" she asked, turning the brass knob. "We still need to discuss a lot of things."
"Why are we doing it in here, again?" Jake asked, relieved that Grace had stepped in.
The blonde Angel sighed. "I don't want the others to hear all of this, so we need to either talk here or fly far enough away."
"And you don't exactly have wings," Serenity said, grinning as she wrapped her own tawny wings around her body, encasing herself in feathers.
Grace nodded and pushed open the door, stepping into the soundproofed room and moving aside for the other two to enter. As she closed the door behind them, however, she noticed a small Post-It note sticking to the foam panelling of the steel door. She took it off, carefully, and looked it over. "There's nothing on it?" she said, confused.
"On what?" Serenity asked, and seeing the paper, stepped over to the older Angel. The yellow Post-It was indeed blank, and with a shrug the blue-haired Angel said, "Maybe Lucie left it there as a reminder or something."
Grace looked at the spot the note had been attached to, and found nothing. "Yeah, I guess." Shaking her head, she turned to Jake. "Anyway, we need to talk."
"About...?" the boy asked, hesitant.
"You," Serenity said. "First, I want to know what you were doing here. Why did you knock on the door?"
Jake seemed relieved. "I was walking past the house on my way home from my job, and I decided to take a detour through the backyard."
"Yeah, right," the younger Angel said, putting her hands on her hips. "Why are you even thinking of lying? Any one of us Angels could kill you, without breaking a sweat. And you're lying?" She took a single, intimidating step forward. "Do you want to die?"
Jake shrugged. "I'm not lying. I only knocked in case someone was actually living here, and then I went around back. The place is so run down, I wasn't expecting to meet anything but bugs and weeds."
"All right, enough," Grace said, her green eyes flaring. "If you can't trust us, how are we supposed to trust you?" Her face turned soft suddenly, and she gazed at Jake sadly. "We've told you all of the horrible things we've lived through. Why can't you tell us the truth?"
The boy turned his face away, almost ashamed of himself. "I was looking for a place to run away to," he said quietly. "I hate my home. My parents. My sister. They idolize her, she's such a 'genius,' and I get ignored. I can't take it."
"Your life sounds so bad," Serenity said, her voice flat. "You wanna trade?"
Jake sighed. "I know, I know. I don't have it nearly as bad as you girls do. I mean, you were living as slaves for years. This is as close as I come to that. I'm treated like nothing, and all because my damned sister has a high IQ. I almost wish she were an Angel, too. That way, maybe my parents would look at me again."
"Say that again?" Grace said, her voice obviously restrained. "It almost sounded like you wanted your sister to be hunted and captured - or killed - just so you could be Mama's boy. Am I hearing you correctly?" She grinned darkly. "Wait, don't answer that. I'm pretty sure I heard you right."
Jake stepped back from the blonde, and mentally kicked himself for speaking so stupidly. "I'm sorry," he said. "I used to wish that, back when I thought Angels were monsters. I guess, I was just being too emotional. Sorry."
"You apologize too much," Serenity said. "Shut up."
"So- okay," the boy replied.
Shaking her head, Grace continued. "Okay, we have that first question out of the way. Now, the second. How the hell are we supposed to make any money, let alone enough to feed all six of us?"
"Five," Serenity said. "If Jake needs, he can always get food from home for himself."
The boy nodded, scratching the back of his head as he thought. "Well, maybe we could work on stuff like construction or something. I know people don't like Angels, but if we can convince them that you're tame, then maybe..."
"No," Grace said. "That won't work. You're my age, for crying out loud. Any sane person would see right through that. Besides, even if we could say that, nobody would want to hire an Angel."
"Modeling, then?" Jake proposed. "There's an agent for a big modeling corporation that stops by the shop. Maybe one of you two..." His voice died away as his face grew red.
Serenity was stunned for a moment, then shook her head and giggled. "So you do have some guts. What kind of modeling does this agent do?"
"Uhh..." Jake's face grew a deeper red, and he turned his eyes to the foam tiling above the Angels' heads. Realizing that the girls expected an honest answer, he dropped his gaze to his feet and muttered, "Victoria's Secret."
In the long silence that followed, Serenity felt the initial shock change to a sense of dark satisfaction. Grace, however, found herself growing angry. "What? Just what is going on in that head of yours? Underwear modeling?" The older Angel was nearly screaming, and her hands curled into fists as she advanced on the boy. "You have some nerve, you little freak."
"Calm down, Grace," Serenity said, dragging the girl to a stop. "He's just being honest, you know. Stupid, but honest." She turned her head to Jake and winked. "I like that."
Jake backed up to the wall, pressing himself against the foam as Grace's glare burned holes in his head. "Sorry," he said quickly, fearing the Angel's wrath. "I didn't- I mean, I was just-"
"He was just trying to help," Serenity cooed to the angered girl, and swiftly snatched the bony ridge of her wing. A sharp jolt of pain made Grace's knees weak, and as she collapsed to the ground, the blue-haired Angel said to her, "Besides, he's not wrong about you."
"Shut up," Grace said, gasping from the pain. "We're not doing it. We need to find something."
Jake relaxed his tense body, rubbing his eyes as the blonde Angel stood. As he stepped toward the girls, however, he felt a foam panel pulling away from the wall. Looking to his right arm, he saw that the panel was stuck to his leather coat, and was almost completely free of the rest of the tiling. A green light blinked in the shadows, and Jake removed the tile completely, revealing a sleek, black laptop. "Hey, girls?"
"What?" Grace asked, still angry at the boy. When she saw the laptop, her eyes grew wide. "What the-" She walked forward to the wall, and delicately removed the laptop. Opening the top carefully and clicking the mousepad, the notebook's display sprung to life. The wallpaper, a picture of Serenity flying through the air, was obscured as a window popped up demanding a password for the user, Lucie.
"Any ideas?" Jake asked, looking over Grace's left shoulder.
"Maybe 'Angel'?" Serenity said, peering at the laptop over the blonde Angel's right shoulder.
Grace inputted the word, but when she pressed enter the window re-appeared. "Nope," she said. Thinking for a moment, she submitted the names of each of the Angels, but still none worked. "What could it be?"
"Did you try birthdays?" Jake asked. When none of the girls' birthdays worked, he put out another suggestion. "What if there's no password?"
"Excuse me?" Serenity said, turning to the boy. "What do you mean, 'no password?'"
"I mean, try putting nothing in, and pressing Enter." When Grace tried, the window disappeared. "See?"
Shaking her head, the older Angel silently scanned the screen. A folder titled 'Grace' caught her attention, and she opened it, curious. Inside, the folder was divided into four sub-folders, titled, 'Family,' 'School,' 'Training,' and 'Purpose.'
"What the hell?" the blonde said, opening the 'Family' folder. Inside, document and picture files filled the screen, and the three teens watched the scroll bar on the right of the window shrink. Grace opened the first file, 'Birth Certificate,' and was surprised to see a scan of her birth certificate, an image of her as a baby, and of her parents holding her. "How did she get this?"
Closing out of the first document, she scanned the titles of the other files. Her eyes grew wide as the cursor highlighted everything from a 'Family Tree,' to a 'Christmas Picture - 1990.' Grace opened the picture file, and nearly dropped the laptop as a snapshot of her extended family popped up on the screen. "Oh, my God," she said breathlessly, staring at a smiling, young version of Lucie sitting next to her in the front of the picture.
__________
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