“How do you know all this?”

“Phen told me. He’s the angel I met in the church. He warned me about the Black Wings.”

She stops abruptly, dropping her eyes.

“What?” I prompt gently. “What did he say?”

She closes her eyes briefly and then opens them. “He said that they might try to find me, someday.”

“But why would they want to find you?”

She looks up.

“Because my father was one. And because they want us,” she says. Her gold eyes are suddenly fierce. “They’re building an army.”

“Mom!” I scream the minute the door of the house closes behind me. She comes running out of her office, alarm all over her face.

“What? What is it? Are you hurt?”

“Why didn’t you tell me there’s a war between the angels?”

She stops. “What?”

“Angela Zerbino’s an angel-blood,” I say, still spazzing out. “And she told me that there’s this war that’s going on between the good and bad angels.”

“Angela Zerbino’s an angel-blood?”

“Dimidius. Now answer my question.”

“Well, honey,” she says, still looking confused. “I assumed you knew.”

“How would I know if you didn’t tell me? You never tell me anything!”

“There’s both good and evil in this world,” she says after a long pause. “I told you that.”

I can see how carefully she’s choosing her words, even now. It’s infuriating.

“Yeah, but you never told me about Black Wings,” I exclaim. “You never told me that they go around recruiting or killing all the angel-bloods they come across.”

She flinches.

“So it’s true.”

“Yes,” she says. “Although I think they are more interested in the Dimidius.”

“Right, because Quartarius don’t have much power,” I say sarcastically. “I guess I should be relieved, then.”

Mom’s still processing. “So Angela Zerbino told you she was an angel-blood. She just told you?”

“Yep. She showed me her wings and everything.”

“What color were they?”

“Her wings? White.”

“How white?” she asks intently.

“They were a perfect, eye-piercing white, Mom. Why does it matter?”

“The shade of our wings reflects our standing in the light,” she says. “White Wings have white wings, of course, and Black Wings have black. For most of us in the middle, the offspring, our wings are varying shades of gray.”

“Your wings have always looked pretty white to me,” I say. I’m instantly struck with the urge to summon my wings, to see what shade they are, to discover what my spiritual state really is. I sure as heck don’t know.

“My wings are fairly light,” Mom admits, “but not as the new-fallen snow.”

“Well, Angela’s were white,” I say. “I guess that means she’s a pure soul.”

Mom goes to the cupboard and gets a glass. She fills it with water at the sink, then stands drinking it slowly. Calmly.

“A Black Wing raped her mom.” I look at her to see if there’s any reaction to that. None. “She’s worried that someday they’ll show up to collect her. You should have seen her face when she talked about it. Scared. Like, really, really scared.”

Mom puts the glass down and looks at me. She doesn’t seem at all rattled by anything I’ve told her. Which rattles me even more. And then I realize.

“You already knew about Angela,” I say. “How?”

“I have my sources. She hasn’t exactly tried to hide her abilities. For someone who’s worried about Black Wings, she’s not being very careful. And to reveal herself to you like that. It’s reckless.”

I stare at her. At that moment it fully dawns on me how much my mother hasn’t told me.

“You’ve been lying to me,” I say. “I tell you everything, and you’ve been lying to me.”

She meets my eyes, startled by my accusation. “No, I haven’t. There are just some things that—”

“Are there a lot of angel-bloods in Jackson Hole?”

She seems hurt by my sudden question. She doesn’t answer.

I pick up my backpack from where I tossed it onto the kitchen floor and head for my room.

“Hey,” says Mom. “I’m still talking to you.”

“No, apparently you’re not.”

“Clara,” she calls after me in an exasperated voice. “If I don’t tell you everything, it’s for your own protection.”

“That doesn’t make sense. How does being clueless protect me?”

“What else did Angela tell you?”

“Nothing.”

I go into my room and slam the door, take off my coat, and throw it on the bed, fighting the urge to scream, or cry, or both. Then I go to the mirror and summon my wings, gathering them around in front of me so I can see the feathers more closely. They’re fairly white, I think, running my hand over them. Not as the new-fallen snow, as my mother said, but still white.

Not as white as Angela’s, though.

I hear Mom come down the hall. She stops in front of my door. I wait for her to knock or come in and tell me that she doesn’t want me hanging out with Angela anymore, for my own protection. But she doesn’t. She just stands there for a minute. Then I hear her walk away.

I wait for a while, until I’m sure that Mom is safely downstairs again, and then I sneak down the hall to Jeffrey’s room. He’s sitting at his desk with his laptop, typing away, chatting with someone by the looks of it. When he sees me he types something really fast, then jumps up to face me. I turn the music down a notch so I can hear myself think.

“Did you tell her you’d b-r-b?” I say with a smirk. “What’s her name, anyway? No point denying it. It will be more embarrassing for you if I have to ask around at school.”

“Kimber,” he concedes immediately. “Her name’s Kimber.” His expression stays neutral, but I can see a hint of red creeping into his ears.

“Pretty name. The blond girl, I assume?”

“You didn’t come in here just to mock me, right?”

“Well, that’s pretty fun, but no. I wanted to tell you something.” I move a pile of dirty laundry off his beanbag chair and sit on it. My breath catches for a second, like I’m breaking a rule, Mom’s all-important “don’t tell your kids anything” rule, as a matter of fact. But I’m sick of living in the dark. And I’m ticked off, ticked off at everything, at my whole crappy life and all the people in it. I need to vent.

“Angela Zerbino’s an angel-blood,” I say.

He blinks.

“Who?”

“She’s a junior, tall, long black hair, kind of Emo, gold eyes. Loner.”

He looks at the ceiling thoughtfully like he’s calling up Angela’s face in his mind. “How do you know she’s an angel-blood?”

“She told me. But that’s not the right question, Jeffrey.”

“What do you mean?”

“What you should be asking is why Angela Zerbino told me that she was an angel-blood. And if you asked me that, I would answer that she told me because she knew that I was an angel-blood.”

“Huh? How did she know you were an angel-blood?”

“See, now that’s the right question,” I say. I lean forward. “She knew because she saw you take on the wrestling team last month. She watched you wrestle Toby Jameson, who probably weighs two hundred pounds, without even working up a sweat. And she said to herself, wow, that guy’s a good wrestler, he must be an angel.”

His face actually pales. It’s mildly satisfying. Of course I’m leaving out some of the other troublesome details, my stupid thing about the birds and French class and the way I ogled her angel shirt, falling so neatly into her trap. But Jeffrey was the linchpin: She was only certain that we were something more than human after she observed him on the wrestling mat that day.

“Did you tell Mom?” He looks a little green at the thought. Because if I told Mom, that’d be it for Jeffrey. No more wrestling, or baseball in the spring, or football in the fall or whatever he was dreaming up. He’d probably be grounded until college.

“No,” I say. “Although she’s bound to ask the right question herself, sooner or later.” It’s kind of odd, come to think of it, that she hasn’t asked me yet. Maybe her sources already told her that, too.