Free Finding Alice (Alice Clark Series) by Andrea DiGiglio Page A

handed me my cup. “Mmm. Thank you.”
    We sat on the edge of my bed as we had just weeks ago, two souls still intertwined as if our destiny was to be together in this moment. I looked at him and saw his stare was elsewhere. I followed it to my jewelry box. He looked at me; I could see through this stare, at the gears turning in his head for the precise words to use.
    “This is a complicated subject,” he blurted out, catching me completely off guard. I was expecting something a little bit more elegant than that.
    I wasn’t expecting to talk about this so soon, after we just… “I didn’t assume it would be easy to talk about,” I said.
    “I’m not what you think I am. It’s dangerous for both of us for you to know any of this. But at this point, it’s not safe for you to be in the dark anymore, either.”
    “Okay. What are you, an angel?”
    “No. I’m what people call a nephilim .” The word rolled off of his tongue with such shame.
    “I don’t understand.”
    “Sure you do. You’ve been writing about it for two days for your paper. If you can believe I could be an angel, surely you can believe this is the truth.”
    I nodded in agreement, trying to wrap my head over every strange moment that had happened since I met Cole. Similar things had happened to me my whole life, though; they had been intensified since he had come into the picture. I felt him watching me as I tried to put this unexplainable puzzle together, hearing his voice in my head as he heard mine too. I remembered the feather on his seat at the bar, which only made me think of my jewelry box filled with those that I had found throughout my life. Being attacked and not only surviving, but injuring a man twice my size; throwing him into my car hard enough to dent it could only mean one thing.
    “I am too,” I said. The tone of my voice was questioning. He nodded. Panic started to take over my entire body. He tried to calm me but I pushed away his hand. “Do I have wings?” I felt ridiculous asking the question. Of course I didn’t. I was having a nervous breakdown.
    “I don’t know, I’m afraid I don’t have very many answers for you.” He reached his hand out to me; I felt his rejection as I let it hover there. Finally, I took it. We sat there for hours talking about our very similar miserable childhoods.
    “My last foster family wasn’t bad. I liked Jill but when she got pregnant, everything just changed. To see her so in love with someone she didn’t even know, seeing how she felt for her unborn child. I just don’t get how my parents could give me up…never even want to know me,” I confessed. Cole noticed my tension rise from talking about my past and immediately took it as a cue to tell his story, or part of it anyway.
    “I met my father. I hated how much I looked like him. I just didn’t want to be like him. After growing up in foster care and eventually taking off to be on my own, he got in touch with me. I was angry. He waited until the hard work of raising me was over. He really only contacted me to tell me what I was, and… Well, I haven’t seen him since.” Cole ended with a hint of sadness and anger in his voice. In an attempt to alleviate the silence I grabbed my jewelry box to show Cole, though we both knew he’d opened it before this moment. He stared down at its contents and continued. “From what I understand, when we use our abilities, I guess we shed feathers just as if our wings were extended in some invisible way. From what my sperm donor told me, Angels, carrying out God’s will to remove all nephilim, use them when found as a sort of tracking system. Luckily for us picking them up is instinctual and keeps us hidden.” I shut the box in his hands and watched him hold back a groan.
    “What?” I asked.
    “You have this amazing scent. It reminds me of vanilla bean and butter cream. Your feathers smell like they are bathed in it.”
    “I smell like what ?” I began to laugh hysterically. “It