Dark Halo (An Angel Eyes Novel) (9 page)

“Okay,” I say, a smile undoing me.

Kaylee looks around the living room for the first time. Sun streams through the windows, lighting the furnishings. A pair of Jake’s dirty socks are still on the floor. His work schedule sits on the coffee table.

I’m scared for him. So scared it hurts.

“Now, where are we setting up camp?”

“Canaan’s room,” I say, blinking back tears.

Kaylee gestures grandly. “After you.”

I have half an Oreo stuck in my teeth, so before we head down the hall I fill two glasses with milk and hand one to Kaylee.

“So, this is Canaan’s chest?” she asks, stepping into his room. “I mean, obviously it’s not his chest, chest, but it’s his chest? And what does it do exactly?”

She’s been here for four minutes and I already have milk shooting out my nose. I wipe it away and try to explain. “This is how the Throne Room communicates with Canaan. It’s where he gets his assignments from.”

“Like you,” she says. “You’re an assignment?”

I nod.

“And this is where your engagement ring just appeared. All magical and stuff.”

“It’s not magic, Kay.” But I really, really don’t want to talk
about the ring right now. It’s gone anyway. There’s not much more to say about it.

“Well, it’s nifty.” She tilts her head, staring at the chest. The lid’s still on. I don’t have the heart to open it and show her the dagger. That’s another thing I’d like to avoid for the night. “I kind of want to climb inside. You think I’d fit?”

“Let’s not find out, okay?”

“You’re the boss.” Kaylee busies herself with all sorts of sleepover rituals. I do my best to pray silently, and I monitor the chest every few minutes, opening the lid just wide enough for me to see inside. But so far there’s been nothing.

“We need music,” Kaylee says, rummaging through her bag. “You pick: Justin or Taylor?”

“Taylor,” I say.

“You said Justin, right? I heard Justin.” She leaves, heading for Jake’s massive stereo in the living room.

I sneak another peek inside the chest. There’s nothing new, just the dagger and a chill that latches onto me before I can stop it.

“I’m starved. What do you want for dinner?” Kaylee hollers over the music.

“Whatever,” I say. “You want help?”

“Nah. Get to praying. Canaan’s got a microwave. I’ll be all right.”

Rubbing my bare arms, I step out of Canaan’s room and into Jake’s. I’m not cold, not really. But getting lost in a sweatshirt sounds nice, and anything in Canaan’s room would swallow me. Gingerly I make my way through the chaos on Jake’s floor until I’m standing in front of the closet. I pilfer through it, finally settling on a navy blue hoodie with a gigantic pocket in the front. The seams are frayed and the drawstring is missing, but it smells like Jake.

I wander back to Canaan’s room and crawl onto the bed. I draw my legs up under the sweatshirt and wrap my arms around my knees. Canaan’s window looks out across the highway. Somewhere the sun is setting—I can’t see it directly, but the sky is a bruise of darkest purple. Pink and orange striations ripple through it. It’s beautiful, but I close my eyes on it all, on the beauty and everything hiding beneath it.

I pray. Silently, of course. The words are more eloquent that way. No stumbling over them, no shame when I can’t get them just right. In my head I’m very articulate. I pray for Jake. For Canaan and Helene. I pray that Jake will walk through the door and that this nightmare will be over. I pray that fear wouldn’t find a permanent home in Stratus. That the dreams finding their way into the minds of my friends and neighbors wouldn’t be tainted by darkness. I pray that Dad would choose God and love instead of hate and doubt. I pray for all kinds of miracles.

When I open my eyes, Kaylee’s there, sitting on the floor with a tray of s

“You did good, Kay. This is the best dinner ever,” I say, staring at my s’more and trying to decide just how best to bite it.

“All they have in the fridge is, like, a hunk of cow and some spicy hot wings.” She swallows and continues, “There’s got to be something in that Bible of yours about an angel eating hot wings. I mean, come on!”

I laugh, a hand clamped over my mouth to keep the crumbs inside.

“Tell me I’m not right,” she says.

But I can’t tell her anything, I’m laughing so hard my stomach
aches. Finally, lying on my back, happy tears streaming down my face, a s’more half-eaten in my mouth, I hear it: the sound of rustling paper. It’s soft, muffled. And if my ear hadn’t been pressed against the chest, I doubt I’d have heard it at all.

I hack and sputter, forcing myself to swallow the bite in my mouth as I sit up and spin around. I lift the lid off the chest and shove it all in one motion. It falls to the ground with a dull
thud
.

A bundle of off-white pages have been added to the chest. I snatch them up. They’re folded in half and in half again, the square of paper looking far more docile than the blood-crusted weapon next to it.

“What is that?” Kaylee says.

“I don’t know. Pages of some sort. They look like they’ve been ripped from . . .”

But Kaylee’s not looking at the paper in my hand. Her eyes are trained on the dagger. I lean past her and grab the lid. It’s awkward with her in the way, but I heft it back in place, shutting the past away.

“Do angels always keep bloody swords in their trunks?”

In spite of the heaviness surrounding us, I snort.

“I guess that didn’t come out right,” Kaylee says, lacking all of the humor I’ve come to expect of her.

“It’s not Canaan’s, Kay. The Throne Room put it there.”

Her face goes white. “Why?”

“I think they were warning us about Damien’s return.”

“That’s Damien’s?”

I nod.

She picks at the polish on her thumbnail. It takes her seventeen scratches to eliminate every last blue sparkle she’d painted on.

“He said he’d killed you once before. The other day make you whole.”oute, in your living room, he told your dad he’d killed you before and he wouldn’t hesitate to do it again.” It’s painful watching someone else dissect the events of yesterday, but I let her do it. I know she needs to understand. “This is how he did it, then. At the warehouse. This is how he killed you, isn’t it?” Before I can answer, she presses her fingers to her eyes. “I remember . . .”

“What, Kay? What do you remember?”

“Rain. And blood. All over your shirt. All over your hands.” She lets her hands fall away and starts picking at her other thumbnail. “But I can’t . . . Why can’t I remember more?”

“Doubt,” I tell her. “Denial. They make us feel better about the things our brains refuse to believe. Once they’ve taken root, they take on a life of their own.”

“You’re saying I’m in denial about the warehouse?”

“Not all of it, obviously, but the angels, the demons? Yeah, I’m guessing you chose denial.”

She moves on to her index finger, scratching, scratching, blue chips flying. “I believe, though. Now I do.”

“I’m glad,” I say, pulling her into a hug. “You have no idea how glad I am.”

“Do you think I’ll remember?”

“I don’t know, Kay. Maybe.” I wish I had time to sit and really explain everything to her. Wish I could open the Bible and show her the stuff Jake’s shown me. Well, really, I wish Jake was here to do that; he’s so much better than I am at the Bible stuff. I always forget where everything is. But we don’t have time for any of that. We have to figure out what these pages are.

“Okay, bloody swords aside, what is this?” Kaylee asks, swatting at the pages still clenched in my hand.

I think I know what they are, but I’m hesitant to say. Hesitant to hope. I unfold the wad of paper, and now I’m sure.

“They’re pages torn from a journal,” I say. “From Ali’s journal.”

“That ratty leather book Marco’s always carrying around?”

“It wasn’t always ratty,” I tell her. “Ali loved that thing.”

“So, let me get this straight,” Kaylee says, fingering the pages in my hand. “This Throne Room of yours—”

“Not mine.”

“—tore pages out of the journal in Marco’s pocket and dropped them into this chest for Canaan to find?”

I think it through. It’s possible, I guess. Anything’s your mother.”inowpossible, but . . .

“There were pages missing from Ali’s journal.” I sort through the thin stack in my hand.

“What?”

“Before he left, Marco had Ali’s journal out. He was asking me a question about a quote she’d copied down and . . .”

“And?”

“And I noticed a section had been torn out.”

“So. Okay. Then someone . . .”

“Maybe Ali . . . ,” I venture.

“Sure, maybe Ali, but
someone
tore the pages out, and then an unspecified amount of time passed and the Throne Room snatched them up and delivered them here.”

“Sounds about right,” I say.

“But why tear the pages out to begin with?”

“Because Ali never carried a purse. I bet she just tore these out and crammed them into her pocket.”

“This is all so cryptic. She could have helped us out and been a bit more specific. Do you know what these notes mean?”

“I don’t. Ali always joked she was doing top secret research. I never thought she was serious.”

“I know what this is though. This is Bellwether,” Kay says.

“The lighthouse?”

“Yeah,” she says, sinking back next to me.

I look at the page she’s shifted to the top and think maybe she’s right. On the back of it is a pencil sketch of the lighthouse. Ali’s captured it well. I recognize the cliff line behind it.

“In Beacon City,” I say. I flip through other pages, looking at their mostly blank backs. One has the sketch of a rock garden on it, but the others are empty. In the top left corner of the page with the lighthouse sketch, Ali’s delicate cursive hand has penned a phone number. I recognize the Portland area code. Below it are the words:
just
past
mile
marker
178, 1pm

“I know that number,” Kaylee says, reading over my shoulder. “Gosh, whose is it?”

“Let’s find out.”

The phone’s already in my hand. I dial and put it on speaker.

“If we knew what freeway she was talking about, we might be able to figure out—”

drip,
The voice mail on the other end of the line has picked up. My hand goes slack and the phone slips out. Kaylee picks it up off the carpet and ends the call.

“Holy crab cakes,” she says.

“Why did Ali have Olivia Holt’s phone number in her journal?” And then another memory surfaces. “There was another sketch.”

“What?”

“In Marco’s journal. It was of Olivia’s arm. I didn’t know it was her arm at the time, but it was.”

“Okay, Dr. Frankenstein, what makes you an expert at identifying arms—especially from pencil sketches?”

“The scars,” I say.

“I’ve known Liv for a while now, and I haven’t seen any scars.”

“Yeah, but I have.”

Kaylee’s face is screwed up so tight I’m actually surprised she can blink. But she manages eleven of them before her brow relaxes and her jaw loosens. She looks like she’s going to explode with all the questions crammed into her head, but she settles for an easy one.

“She has scars?”

“Yeah.”

“And Ali met her?”

“Must have.”

“Why?”

“That’s not the right question to be asking,” I say, jumping to my feet. “We want to know where they met.”

“I’m guessing it was a half mile past mile marker 178.”

“Me too,” I say, dashing out of the room and across the hall into the study. I hit Jake’s desk chair at a run. I have to grab both sides of the desk to keep from sliding too far, but I steady myself and pull up Google.

“What are you searching for?” Kaylee asks, following me in, albeit at a much more reasonable pace.

But I can’t slow down. I can’t stop. I’ve got a feeling that . . .

“They’ve turned Bellwether into a pastry shop?” she asks, her eyes on the page I’m clicking through.

“Just the keeper’s house,” I say. “The lighthouse is up the road . . .”

“Across that creepy bridge,” Kaylee says. “I remember.”

I click on the link that says Directions and my eyes scream across the page. Looking, looking . . . your mother.”inow

“There!” I say, jamming my finger into the screen and reading aloud, “‘If you’re traveling on Highway 101, we are two and a half miles north of the world-famous Sea Lion Caves and a half mile north of mile marker 178.’”

“Ali met Liv at Bellwether?”

“I think so.”

“But why?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? What’s Ali’s connection to Olivia?” I grab my phone from Kaylee’s hand and dial Canaan. After four rings it goes to voice mail. Next I try Helene. Nothing. Forcing myself not to curse, I redial Olivia’s number. But every single call goes to voice mail.