Landing (12 page)

Eventually, Tarren’s aura lulls
into softer blues, and he snores a little, which is kind of funny. He sleeps
lightly, and his twitching energy tugs at my hunger, until I give up on sleep
and pull out my notebook. The only thing I can seem to write is this dumb
diary. These ugly confessions. This suffocating self-pity. It’s just that I
can’t, can’t, can’t think about what I’ll have to do tomorrow—I glance at the
clock...well, technically today I guess.

Gabe staggers past our door at 3:00
a.m.. He stops at his room and mutters a curse as he misses the card reader
twice before yanking open his door. I follow the sounds of his heavy footfalls
as he makes his way across the room. As far as I can tell, he only manages to
get his coat and one shoe off before he collapses onto the bed and doesn’t get
up again.

Tarren’s aura spikes. I twist
toward him, tugged by the leash of his energy. As his aura jolts again, I feel
myself losing it, the song ramping up—but I know this game now. I ball my hands
into fists, haul up the shields inside my mind, and set my teeth hard against
each other.

He’s lying on his stomach, head
turned away from me, and I can see his powerful shoulders tensing. His aura
leaps again, higher, un-restrained by his usual control. The bulbs punch out of
each of my palms, and I know it would help my control if I didn’t look, but I
can’t take my eyes off his energy.

Tarren’s aura is almost
incandescent, filled with a tapestry of shifting colors that I’ve never seen in
him before.  So many secrets streaming off his body, but I don’t know what they
mean, only that he suffers from them. Suffers greatly. It has to be Tammy he
dreams of.

His energy ratchets up, peaking in
a flourish of red that nearly short-circuits my brain. Almost too late, I slip
back down into my bed and close my eyes. Tarren snaps awake. His heart is a
clamoring cymbal that fills the room, accompanied by his ragged breaths. He
struggles mightily to pull his body under control, swallowing his breaths,
calming down his heart. Sweat beads across his forehead, and his aura is shaky
and pale.

“Don’t say anything,” he whispers.

Lonely brother.

I sit up and throw off my covers.
Tarren turns, watches as I get up out of bed and assume a pushup position on
the floor. I wait for him, but he just stares at me.

I start my pushups, slow and even,
closing my eyes and letting my muscles pulse. After a pause, Tarren slips out
of his bed. He stands over me, but I just keep on doing those fucking pushups.

Tarren crouches down, gets into
pushup position shoulder-to-shoulder with me, waits until I’m all the way up,
then follows me back down. He matches my pace. I keep going, looking straight
ahead. When red hues start rippling along Tarren’s chest and triceps, I lie on
my back and start on crunches. Tarren follows me. Eventually, I move us to
lunges. After the last one, I stand up. Tarren stands too. His long sleeve
shirt is damp with sweat. He’s breathing hard, but his energy is steady.

I don’t know what to say, so I turn
and crawl into my bed. I have no idea what time it is. Tarren takes a quick
shower then lies down on his bed. We never even looked at each other. I turn
toward the window, intent on waiting out the night. Instead, I fall into an
easy sleep; the best I’ve ever had on the road.

Chapter 17

The door to trailer sixteen swings
open before I knock.

“There she is!” Kyle’s face breaks
into a wide smile.
Welcome back Little One.

“Hi,” I mumble and rub my arm. The
wind is a cool whisper on the back of my neck.

“What do you think?” He frames his
face with both hands. “Better with the makeup, right?”

Kyle has shaggy black hair. His
eyes are too wide apart, his nose too long, and his chin too weak, but when he
smiles everything seems to line up just right; like his features were set askew
for just this purpose.

“You, uh, look distinguished.”

Kyle laughs. “I’ll have to remember
that one. Don’t just stand there.” He beckons me into the trailer. I hesitate.
Gabe insisted that I stay outdoors where he and Tarren could maintain a clear
shot. Course, he also wanted me to wear a wire, but that wasn’t happening.

“We don’t bite,” Kyle says.

I give him a nervous smile and step
into the trailer. It’s larger inside then I expected, clean and bright. The
side wall is a quilt of colors. Postcards, I realize; a collage covering the
whole wall. Jane has her long legs stretched out on a beige couch. She stares
at me over the lip of a book, presenting the perfect Snow White visage: milky
skin, rosebud mouth, and ebony hair cut short and combed into smooth waves
around her head.

Her expression is hard as she
swings her legs around and places the book on the floor, face down. “It’s good
that you came back,” she says. “You need to learn.”

“Thanks.”

The hum jacks up in my head, which,
I think, means the two of them are mind talking. I turn away, study the
collage, and try not to dissolve into a puddle of mucky fear.

Each postcard has a number penned
in the corner. Seven for Anchorage. Three for Sioux Falls. Six for the whole state
of Connecticut. I fixate on this card. It says, “Greeting from Connecticut.”
Each large bubbled letter contains a wholesome scene from the state: a
watermill, a ship coasting on the harbor, a tall lighthouse that I recognize as
Five Mile Point, a family picnicking in the sunlight. I lived in Connecticut my
whole life—at least as much of it as I can remember—and my family never once
had a picnic. There wasn’t enough anti-bacterial hand sanitizer in the world to
get Karen outside for any extended period of time.

I come back to that number. Six. Do
they record their kills in each city they pass through?

“We rate them.” Kyle puts a bottle
of water in my hand. “I thought Connecticut was a seven, but
this one
is
very hard to please.” He jerks his thumb at Jane.

“You always believe the best in
everything,” she challenges back, “and everyone.” Jane pins me with another
suspicious look. “Where did you come from? How did you find us? We don’t even
know your name.”

“Darling,” Kyle starts.

“No Kyle.” Jane looks up at him.
“She needs to answer the question. We can’t be stupid about this.”

“It’s okay,” I tell Kyle. I fiddle
with the cap on the water bottle as I screw my courage.

“My name is Laurel Wilkens,” I
begin. Tarren and I spent last night mapping out the story, and Gabe found me a
plausible identity this morning. The lies fall readily off my tongue. I tell
them about my rich ex-boyfriend, Garret, who had a temper and didn’t like the
“ex” part so much. How he had no trouble trespassing the restraining order.

Jane pats the couch next to her,
and I sit down. I describe a scuffle in my driveway where a wild-eyed Garret
threw me into the cab of his pickup with amazing strength. My voice grows
hushed and quivery as I tell them about the wild drive into the desert, and the
two needles Garret plunged into me. This next part needs no lies or
embellishments. I describe the pain of the transformation.

The two angels listen, and even
Jane’s face grows soft.

Still huffing and shuddering, I
tell them about the cop who pulled up just as Garret was readying the final
injection and how Garret jumped out of the car to take care of him, leaving the
keys in the truck’s ignition.

Now, the big sell. I close my eyes
and let the tears wind their way down my face. I describe how I slipped into
the driver’s seat and mindlessly careened down the desert roads until I lost
the pavement and hit a clump of shrubs. A good samaritan stopped to help, but
something happened to my hands. I grabbed hold of him, needing something that I
couldn’t even begin to describe. He spasmed and choked and then he was dead
with my hands still on him. Monster hands. I left his body in the desert, took
his car, and drove as far away from Lubbock as I could. His wallet was sitting
in the cup holder, and it had enough cash to buy another tank of gas.

Here’s the riskiest part of the
story. Tarren thinks it’ll pass muster as a believable ability. I’m not so
sure. Good thing my voice is supposed to be trembling like a willow reed caught
in a storm. “I…I…was drawn to the park,” I whisper. “I don’t know how, but I
had a…a…sense. And then you two found me.”

I look down at my gloved hands and
press my thumb against the tender center of my right palm. “I don’t know what
Garret did to me,” I huff, “but I know I’m dangerous. I can’t ever go back. I
might hurt my family. I got a little sister. I’m sorry.” I wipe the tears away
from my chin. “I’m just so…so scared.”

Jane glances at Kyle. The humming
revs up in my head, and I shiver. Did I overdo it with the tears and shaky voice?
Was the “sense” I described in finding them so obvious a lie? There’s also
still this terrible, tingling fear that Kyle doesn’t just speak inside people’s
heads. If he can get any thread of my thoughts, then he knows, and he and Jane
are probably discussing how to kill me without getting any blood on the carpet.
I glance up at the window and wonder if Tarren and Gabe have any kind of shot.
The trailer is suddenly small, suffocating, and spinny; probably because I’ve
forgotten to breathe again.

“You’ve been treated real bad,”
Kyle says at last. “That boy, he shouldn’t have done that to you. His Guide
should have taught him better.”

“Should’ve never been turned to
begin with,” Jane snaps. “There’s no standards anymore. No respect for The
Other Side.”

“The what?” I ask.

“The Other Side,” Kyle says with a
wan smile. “Our side, that is. It means, uh,” he glances at Jane, “kind of a
code of conduct we’re supposed to follow. A Guide’s duty is to protect those he
or she chooses to Ascend, to teach the Cherubs how to survive.”

There’s a code to this thing?” I
look up at Jane.

“There was.” She nods, and her
voice drops. “Even villains have rules.”

“We’re not villains, love,” Kyle
counters. “We’re revolutionaries. We’re ushering in the next age of human
evolution.”

“He thinks we’re on a noble quest,”
Jane informs me.

“And my beautiful wife thinks we’re
unholy monsters.” Kyle grins and raises his hands above his head. “Bogga,
wogga, ugga!”

Jane frowns. “That’s not funny.”

When it becomes apparent that they
don’t plan on killing me, I try not to let my breath out in a big relieved
whoosh.

“I have so many questions,” I say.
“I don’t even know where to begin.” Cheesy line, but it works.

Jane turns to me and purses her
lips for a moment, thinking. “Let’s start with what we are,” she says.
“Someone, somewhere, had a real crappy sense of humor. They called this…well,
us…Angels.”

***

At my request, we exit the trailer
and step into the barren fields behind the large circus tent. A few of the
workers and other performers amble about or sit on their trailer steps. A dog
scampers around, sniffing and lifting its leg every so often.

Gabe and Tarren are out here
somewhere, squinting down the scopes of their sniper rifles, though I can’t
catch any sense of them. I shiver and cut off those thoughts.

“Let’s find someplace a little more
quiet,” Jane says next to me.

“What about the woods?” I nod to
the patch of thin trees huddled together in the distance.

We start walking. I rub my arm
absently. Jane holds out her hand and Kyle takes it. The wind is cold and mean
today. Jane is only wearing a pair of studded jeans and a silky red tank top
that matches her lipstick. I wait for goose bumps to spring across her exposed
arms, but she and Kyle both seem perfectly comfortable in the low temperatures.

They tell me their own story. Kyle
was a hotshot attorney working eighty hour weeks, throwing back blood pressure
medication like breath mints. After a decade of sacrifice, he made partner.
Besides a corner office, another perk was an invite into a very exclusive club.

“This was thirteen years ago,” Kyle
muses. “Things were different back then.”

“The Other Side. More of the angels
followed the code,” Jane says. “There were standards, an authority structure.
We were kind of like this big extended family. And now it’s just…” She looks at
Kyle.

He grins. “Hell in a hand basket.”

“Something like that,” Jane
murmurs.

Their clasped hands swing to and
fro.

“It wasn’t a difficult decision,
for me at least,” Kyle continues. “Truth is, I looked around at the world, and
I realized we’re fucked, you know?” Kyle laughs. “We’ve got half the population
starving to death and living in hovels while the other half is obese and
miserable as hell in their big mansions. We can’t seem to stop hating each other
and warring over something pointless. Usually religion, the thing that preaches
harmony and love. Pretty sad, huh?”

“Greed,” Jane says.

“Yeah, greed,” Kyle agrees. “This
ship is going down, and I’m thinking it’s going to be sooner rather than
later.” Kyle shrugs. “Becoming an angel was a chance to start over. It sounded
so damn exciting.”

“I said ‘no’,” Jane cuts in,
“absolutely not. We are not going to start killing people.”

We breach the woods, and banded
shadows sweep across us as we walk. The dead leaves are thick and loud beneath
our feet. Even as I listen to them speak, my spine seizes at every sudden trill
from a bird or the rattle of leaves when the wind blows.

“We had some bad fights, didn’t we,
darling?” Kyle brings Jane’s hand to his mouth and kisses her knuckles. “This
one, she was a vegetarian. Couldn’t imagine taking energy from living things.”

Jane looks down at her boots. “Do
we have to tell this story?”

“Come on, it was a long time ago.”

Kyle looks at me. “We made a
compromise. Jane agreed to the Ascension, and we both swore to each other that
we’d never take a human life.” He laughs abruptly, and Jane pulls her hand from
his grip. “I lasted two weeks,” he admits. “Jane got through the entire month,
but only because she didn’t leave the house.”

“I killed the mailman,” Jane tells
me in a flat voice. “People saw. That was it. Our Guide cleaned everything up,
but we had to leave.”

“Everyone knew the mailman was an
alcoholic.” Kyle puts his hand around Jane’s waist and pulls her into his body.
“Those were hard times for us. We wandered, aimless, wiling away our life’s
savings, still learning about our new bodies. Jane hated the killing, didn’t
you?”

“I still hate it,” Jane says,
though her voice lacks conviction.

The easy smile comes off of Kyle’s
face. “I know baby,” he whispers to her, “but it’s not so bad anymore, right?”

Jane lays her cheek against Kyle’s
ear. “I’m sorry,” she says to him. “Sometimes it’s so easy I scare myself.”

Kyle looks at me, and those small
brown eyes reveal a surprising depth. “Eventually we found others, like us who
didn’t want to kill innocents. They showed us a different way. Things got
better after that.”

“Tell her the name.” Jane’s mouth
quirks up in a smile. The expression is all acid. “We have ironic names for everything.”

“They call themselves, well, we
call ourselves, Angels of Mercy,” Kyle says. “We didn’t make it up, I swear.
It’s an informal network spread out all across the country. Angels who vow only
to feed off of the dregs of society.”

“Or the dying,” Jane adds. “Some of
them sneak into hospice facilities.”

“People who deserve death, either
as a punishment or as a mercy,” Kyle says. “And thus our guilt is wiped clean.”

“That sounds…,” I offer but don’t
really know how to finish. It makes a sort of sense, I think. I need time to
let it all sink in.

We settle in a warm puddle of
sunlight, each digging a little pocket for ourselves within the bed of leaves.
I glance up at the brightly-colored trees, but I don’t see any hint of my
brothers.

Kyle is staring at me again.
“Everything you’re going through right now, the doubts, the fears, the endless
stream of questions, we’ve been there. But it gets better. I promise it does.
We’ll teach you how to channel your strengths, discover your ability, and how
to control the hunger.”

Little bells of joy start ringing
like crazy inside my brain. “You can…” my voice catches, “control the hunger?”
Even now, far from the range of humans, the song still plays its alluring notes
in my head.

Kyle says, “It’s a process that requires
a lot of training, a lot of time, and a lot of feeding. That’s what a Guide can
help you with.”

“You need human energy,” Jane
clarifies. She crosses her long legs and leans against Kyle. “Feeding on
animals will keep you alive and miserable.”

“Oh,” I say numbly. Those little
bells of joy are distinctly quiet.

“Feed,” Kyle says, “and feed often,
otherwise the hunger will overwhelm you. It’ll ring in your head until you
can’t hear anything else. You’ll never develop your full strength or your
ability. I think you’re a Mental by the way,” he adds casually.

“I’m mental?”

“No. Well, maybe, but we’ll judge
that later,” Kyle laughs. “I think you’re
a Mental
.
That thing
you said about “sensing us”, it sounds like a Mental thing.” Kyle grins at me.
I’m
a Mental too. Jane’s an Elemental.