26. Sydney
There really should be an eighties movie montage with a badass soundtrack if anyone had to learn a bunch of skills at once.
Even Ren got one in Footloose. For now, I was just learning to put my wings away and bring them back when I needed to and everyone kept telling me to just not think about where they were going.
Except that was all I could think about. They were massive. They weren’t exactly going inside my back or I’d be ringing a bell in Notre Dame. Was there another realm where a bunch of free range wings lived when they weren’t attached to a body? I’ll bet that was super fucked up.
“Is this your writer brain being weird?” Kujo asked.
“What? It was a valid question. They either shrink and go back inside my back or they go somewhere. It stands to reason that if there are realms with demons, angels, Fae, and dragons there might be one for our wings.”
Nero shuddered.
“That would be weird. Now you have me thinking about where mine go. They are a part of my anatomy and they hurt if someone pulls on them. But if I don’t want them out, they just go away.”
“You’re both being ridiculous. It’s magic. When you get a boner, the entire block gets a boner. I get a boner and I didn’t consent to you giving me a boner. That makes about as much sense as where your wings go,” Kujo ranted.
“That makes perfect sense. My ex got a boner in his sleep every night. Men don’t need magic to get erect.”
Kujo shot me a withering glare.
“You know what I mean. We don’t even know what happens to angels and demons if they die. We aren’t exactly going to figure out where our wings go. Is it even important?”
“Well, if I could visualize putting them somewhere, I could probably make them go away and come back when I need them.”
“So, make something up,” Celix said. “I don’t have wings and have never gone through this, but if it helps you to think of putting them somewhere, then make something up. That should work, right?”
“Yeah, it should,” Kujo said. “Magic is about intention. If that’s what Sydney needs, then it should work.”
I needed a Bat Cave. But not the Bat Caves from the latest two thousand reboots. The fun Bat Caves when the bat suit had nipples or back in the spandex days when I’d watch reruns with Mom.
Huh. For once, my magic cooperated. I had my Bat Cave and a case for my wings. I pictured my wings there, and they just disappeared. Nothing exploded and Kujo didn’t go flying across the room.
“Ha! Who’s your momma?”
“Not so fast, lil momma. Can you take them back out again?” Kujo asked.
I squared my shoulders. I could do this. I could control one aspect of all this new magic flooding into my veins. I just needed to fetch my wings from the pretty glass case I left them in. I felt a tingling on my shoulder blades and then the additional weight as my wings appeared.
I grinned and put them away again. I couldn’t control that Lucifer was my father or that he’d been kidnapped before I was born. There wasn’t much I could do about the fact that the majority of his family was a bunch of nards.
But if I could control my wings, then eventually, I could control my volatile magic.