The Seraphim Project

Chapter Three

Ten minutes later, we were still standing on the front porch waiting on Sunny and Hawk.

“What’s taking so long?” I called into the house.

“I can’t leave my hair products! I can’t!” Sunny cried from the boys’ bathroom.

I rolled my eyes. “Sunny, you don’t need to use hair products. We’re on the run, for God’s sake! We don’t even know if we’ll have a bathroom!”

He poked his head out of the bathroom to glare at me. “Of course I need hair products! Otherwise my hair won’t be perfect!”

I rubbed a hand over my face and sighed. I didn’t think I’d ever understand Sunny. He spent more time in the bathroom every morning than the rest of us combined.

“If you don’t leave the hair products, I’m shaving your head and getting rid of them anyway.”

He gasped and reached a hand up to his beloved hair. “You wouldn’t,” he accused, glaring at me.

My eyebrows went up. He’d learned a long time ago that I didn’t make idle threats. Fuming, he came to join the rest of the group. With one problem solved, I turned back to the house just as Hawk appeared at the end of the boys’ hall. He had a perplexed look on his face.

“I can’t find my go-bag,” he said. We kept bags ready with supplies for in case we ever needed to split, like now. I was only thankful that we weren’t necessarily in a hurry, because the whole point of the go-bag was to be able to grab it and get out fast. I was still a little worried, though, as I knew there could be more demons or other things created by the Labs coming any minute. I wasn’t sure if the demons were monitored or given a time limit or if they just escaped and happed to find us. I hoped it was the last one, but I highly doubted that it was true.

I turned a knowing look to Falcon. “Where is it?”

He hung his head and headed into his room to pull Hawk’s backpack out from beneath his bed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I moved it so long ago that I forgot I’d hidden it.”

Hawk took the bag and sighed. “Let’s just get out of here,” he said as they joined us on the porch. I pointed Beast, Russ, and Sunny in a direction, and then took off running, Russ in wolf form. All of them were much faster than any human, and as long as we didn’t fly overly fast, they would be able to keep up with us. I still gave them a little bit of a head start.

Falcon took off first. He was a Generation One angel. He seemed huge to us, but really, he was only about six feet tall. The only thing about him that made him inhuman was his wings, but that wasn’t a good thing. He was so heavy that he had to have a wingspan of over eighteen feet, over three feet longer than Hawk’s, and they were also about a foot wider. They were huge and bulky and slower than ours, and he hated it. He took off after the others.

Hawk went next. The scientists had learned from the mistakes of Generation One, and Generation Two was made lighter. Hawk’s bones were hollow like a bird’s, plus he was simply so much leaner than Falcon. If we were normal teenagers, Falcon would be on the football team as a lineman, and Hawk would be a track star. His wingspan was about fifteen feet, and he weighed just over a hundred pounds—half as much as Falcon.

He would have been perfect if the scientists had left it at that. But, of course, they didn’t. They were trying to create things that didn’t really exist, and they’d taken some liberties, like not giving vampire the weaknesses they had in myths. They’d decided that angels should have unbelievable senses, but the human brain wasn’t built to process that much information. Hawk’s had overloaded and he’d lost his sight. Others had lost different senses. Some had lost all of them.