Dangerous Creatures(85)

Excerpt from Icons copyright ? 2013 by Margaret Stohl, Inc.

Excerpt from Unbreakable copyright ? 2013 by Kami Garcia, LLC

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First Edition: May 2014

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data



Garcia, Kami, author.

Dangerous creatures / by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl.

pages cm

Summary: “Siren Ridley and her rocker boyfriend Link move to New York City to make it big with their supernatural band mates in Sirensong, but Caster trouble follows them”—Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-0-316-37031-8 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-316-37626-6 (special edition hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-316-40545-4 (international paperback edition) [1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Sirens (Mythology)—Fiction. 3. Rock groups—Fiction. 4. Love—Fiction.] I. Stohl, Margaret, author. II. Title.

PZ7.G155627Dan 2014 [Fic]—dc23 2013048080

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

RRD-C

Printed in the United States of America E3





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The Pietà of La Purísima


Feelings are memories.

That’s what I’m thinking as I stand there in the Mission chapel, the morning of my birthday. It’s what the Padre says. He also says that chapels turn regular people into philosophers.

I’m not a regular person, but I’m still no philosopher. And either way, what I remember and how I feel are the only two things I can’t escape, no matter how much I want to.

No matter how hard I try.

For the moment, I tell myself not to think. I focus on trying to see. The chapel is dark but the doorway to outside is blindingly bright. That’s what morning always looks like in the chapel. The little light there prickles and stings my eyes.

Like in the Mission itself, in the chapel you can pretend that nothing has changed for hundreds of years, that nothing has happened. Not like in the Hole, where they say the buildings have fallen into ruins, and Sympa soldiers control the streets with fear, and you think about nothing but The Day, every day.

Los Angeles, that’s what the Hole used to be called. First Los Angeles, then the City of Angels, then the Holy City, then the Hole. When I was little, that’s how I used to think of the House of Lords, as angels. Nobody calls them alien anymore, because they aren’t. They’re familiar. We never see them, but we’ve never known a world without them, not Ro and me. I grew up thinking they were angels because back on The Day they sent my parents to heaven. At least, that’s what the Grass missionaries told me, when I was old enough to ask.

Heaven, not their graves.

Angels, not aliens.

But just because something comes from the sky doesn’t make it an angel. The Lords didn’t come here from the heavens to save us. They came from some faraway solar system to colonize our planet, on The Day. We don’t know what they look like inside their ships, but they’re not angels. They destroyed my family the year I was born. What kind of angel would do that?

Now we call them the House of Lords—and Ambassador Amare, she tells us not to fear them—but we do.

Just as we fear her.

On The Day, the dead dropped silently in their homes, never seeing what hit them. Never knowing anything about our new Lords, about the way they could use their Icons to control the energy that flowed through our own bodies, our machines, our cities.

About how they could stop it.

Either way, my family is gone. There was no reason for me to have survived. Nobody understood why I did.

The Padre suspected, of course. That’s why he took me.

First me, and then Ro.

I hear a sound from the far end of the chapel.

I squint, turning my back to the door.

The Padre has sent for me, but he’s late. I catch the eye of the Lady from the painting on the wall. Her face is so sad, I think she knows what has happened. I think she knows everything. She’s part of what General Ambassador to the Planet Hiro Miyazawa, the head of the United Embassies, calls the old ways of humanity. How we believed in ourselves—how we survived ourselves. What we looked up to, back when we thought there was someone up above.

Not something.

I look back to the Lady a moment longer, until the sadness surges and the pain radiates through me. It pulses from my temples and I feel my mind stumble, folding at the edge of unconsciousness. Something is wrong. It must be, for the familiar ache to come on so suddenly. I press my hand to my temple, willing it to stop. I breathe deep, until I can see clearly.