Landing (13 page)

How do these abilities work?
I
think to him. It feels so weird to push my thoughts toward him and actually see
his face respond to them.

“It’s complicated,” Kyle says out
loud. He pauses a moment to think it through. “It’s like there are all these
light switches inside of us that each corresponds to an ability. As part of the
Ascension, the change from human to angel, one of those switches gets flipped.
Well, most of us only get one gift. A few develop more than one.”

“Then there’s the originals,” Jane
murmurs.

“Don’t confuse her.”

“The originals?” I prod.

“Uh,” Kyle takes a breath,
thinking. “There used to be a different way to the Ascension. A way that’s been
lost. Those angels, they’re stronger, much stronger, but there aren’t many of
them left. Anyway, I’ve never heard of angels being able to sense each other
out, but it might be an ability we haven’t heard of or part of something else.
We’ll figure it out when you’ve been able to feed more and express it fully.”

The temperature drops around us,
and the wind is picking up again. I remember why I’m out here; what Tarren
wants me to find.

“Tell me more about the code,” I
say. I keep expecting resistance. Some sort of alarm to trip inside their
heads. My guilt feels so obvious to me, but Kyle obliges my question without a
hint of suspicion or guile. He confirms that a core group—The Exalted—developed
The Other Side as a code to protect the growing angel population. It requires
mentorship of all new angels, a vow of secrecy, and care in the killing of
humans, among other things.

Before Kyle gets too deep into the
particulars, I guide him back to The Exalted. He tells me they are made up of
powerful men and women who hold many strings in government, business, and the
media.

“Who are they, this group?” I ask.
“Are you a part of it?”

Jane rolls her eyes. “We’re not
rich enough, powerful enough, or crazy enough to get an invite. They called
themselves ‘The Exalted’ for chrissake. Basically, they believe that angels are
meant to become the dominant species on the planet. We’ve met a couple of them
on our travels. They’re arrogant, deluded. Their leader…”

“Jane,” Kyle says softly, “he’s our
leader too.”

“Not mine. He’s violent. Deranged.
I’m not the only one who thinks so. There’ve been whispers for years.”

Grand. She’s talking about Grand.
My heart rate jacks up, and I’m sure they can hear it.

“Maybe not so deranged,” Kyle says.
“We’re stronger than humans. Faster. Smarter. We kill them more humanely then
they kill their cows, their chickens, and especially each other. I mean, that’s
evolution, right? We adapt and surpass.”

Jane digs into the leaves on both
sides of her body and runs her hands through the grass below. “It doesn’t
matter what he wants. The Exalted are going extinct. Nobody listens to them
anymore or follows The Other Side. The situation is getting out of control.”

“Gem could change things,” Kyle
says. “The newer generation respects him.”

Jane rolls her eyes. “There are so
many Cherubs. They run around causing trouble with no clue about what they are
or how to stay under the radar. The Exalted try to snuff out investigations,
cover up autopsies, but their power is fading. Eventually our existence will be
revealed. As soon as the humans learn about angels, they’ll come after us and
destroy us all.”

“Well, until that day, we’re going
to have our fun.” Kyle tries to lighten the conversation.

Jane ignores him. “It’s a dangerous
world,” she tells me.

“You mean, like cops?” I ask.

“Cops are the least of your
worries.” Jane cleans her hands on the knees of her jeans. “There are others,
the Vigils.”

“Name for everything, even our
enemies,” Kyle tells me with a short laugh, “but don’t let Jane scare you.
They’re no big deal.”

“She needs to know.” Jane doesn’t
take her eyes off me. “The Vigils are a small group of humans who know about
our kind, who hunt us.”

“Who are they?” My voice skips a
few octaves.

“They’re stupid vigilantes.” Kyle
waves away Jane’s concern. “Everyone’s scared of them like they’re ghosts or
something. They’re just humans with guns and binoculars. They pick off
inexperienced Cherubs, those who don’t clean up after themselves. If you know
what you’re doing you don’t have to worry about them.”

“Kyle doesn’t take anything
seriously.” Jane frowns. “But you need to be really careful. Stay on your guard
at all times.”

“Yeah right.” Kyle leans back on
his hands. His eyes follow a bird that hops along a branch above us. “They’ll
make a mistake eventually and get killed. Maybe I’ll kill ‘em someday. ‘S long
as you play it smart, they’ll never find you.”

Kyle proceeds to tells me how to
play it smart. He and Jane never work and kill in the same town. They go after
criminals, mostly prostitutes, drug addicts or, if nothing else is available,
homeless men and women. Subscribing to the “Angel of Mercy” diet not only makes
Jane feel better, it also lowers the risk of a police investigation. She
prohibits killing anyone wearing a wedding ring. Children and teenagers are out
of the question.

As they speak, Jane lays her head
on Kyle’s shoulder, and he drapes an arm around her. They finish each other’s
sentences, and when Jane teases Kyle about his face, she sits up and kisses his
nose to let him know she was only kidding.

And me? I come to realize that I
like these two, really like them. As they chat about their lives in the circus
and tease each other about their costumes, I tumble into a new world where Kyle
and Jane are my family. My mental movie projector clicks on, and my mind feeds
it a new reel of images. The three of us hunt together, picking out heroine
dealers to wipe from the world. I am filled with energy, with life. I don’t
fall asleep to the song of hunger; I don’t wake up to it. Kyle and Jane invite
me to stay. I am their daughter, and they lavish love and care on me. We travel
the country from town to town, drinking in the adoration of audiences. We are
happy. We are full.

It’s been a long day for you
Little One.
Kyle’s mental words shatter my revelry. “About time we head
back?” He looks to his wife.

“We’ve got to feed tonight before
the show,” Jane confirms. “We can get to Bedford and back with plenty of time
to spare.”

The humming picks up in my head. I
notice how they unconsciously lean in toward each other when they mind talk.
Jane nods. Her face is serious.

They know. They know. They know.

“Laurel, we can finish the
Ascension, if you’d like,” Jane says. “Make you a full angel. We could be your
Guides.”

“Oh,” I say softly. We’re coming
toward the end. Tarren said no more than a couple hours, and I’m already well
past. I look at Kyle, at his hairy arms, small eyes, and big ears. In my head
the little reel of our phantom life plays on, accompanied by sappy montage
music. We three stroll down the boardwalk together. I swing on a trapeze in a
sparkling sequin top that pushes up my cleavage.

Kyle stands. “Little One, it is
your choice.” He extends his hand and pulls me to my feet. “But let me tell
you, it’s a beautiful thing to live exactly as you are. To lose your guilt and
your fear.”

“I need to think about it,” I say.

“You should come feed with us
tonight,” Kyle says. “We’ll find a hospice center, show you exactly how to do
it. They won’t feel any pain, I promise.”

I blink, and the foamy bubbles of
impossibility break and disappear. “I’d like that,” I say truthfully.

“Good.” Kyle grins, but Jane is
studying my face.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

You’re going to die
. Out
loud I say, “I’m just…I want to thank you for helping me.”

“Well, we couldn’t just leave you
for—”Kyle drops his voice low and spooky “—the Vigils to find.”

We amble back through the woods. I
should make the sign. End it now. Tarren and Gabe must be waiting, fingers on
their separate triggers. I can’t really breathe or think. My legs are weak and
unbalanced.

“Jane?” I call to her.

“What is it?” She is so very
gorgeous.

“Can angels have children?” I
whisper, though I know Kyle can hear.

Her face softens. “No. Female
angels can’t conceive.”

Kyle says, “Male angels can
impregnate female humans. It’s very rare, but there are stories that it’s
happened.”

Up ahead, the trees yield to the
shrubby grass of the park.

“The babies are always human,” Jane
says. “Angels cannot be born, they must be created.” She touches her abdomen,
though I’m not sure she realizes it. “It’s better this way,” she whispers.

A great gust of trickster wind
wraps itself around us and several things happen in quick succession.

A half-inflated purple balloon bobs
overhead, tugged along by the breeze. Jane pauses. Her eyes narrow. The hum
ramps up in my head.

“We’re being followed,” she answers
Kyle’s mental question.

Chaos erupts very quietly.

Kyle says, “Are you sure? Wait. Out
in front.”

I watch the balloon drift toward
the sharp blades of grass.

“There’s another one to the left.
They’re cloaking their energy somehow,” Jane hisses.

“That’s impossible.”

Kyle doesn’t understand yet, but
Jane does. She looks at me, sees the tears on my face. “Oh god,” she says.

Kyle follows her gaze. The smile
drops off his face, turning his visage ugly.
Little One, you are a sheep in
wolf’s clothing
. The words are sad and heavy in my mind.

Keep walking. Don’t signal them,
or I’ll kill you faster than they can shoot.

Kyle moves between Jane and me. They
share their thoughts, and Jane shakes her head.

“No,” she says.

“We’ve planned for this.
Armageddon, remember?” Kyle runs his fingers down Jane’s arm. “Nod your head.
Tell me you’re going to run. Start over. Because you love me.”

“Kyle.” Jane’s voice warbles. She
makes a low, keening sound in the back of her throat. “Kyle.”

“Don’t let them see you cry. Just
nod your head.”

She nods. “I love you.”

“Back at you a million times and
then some. Now RUN!”

Kyle dives at me. I try to duck,
but he’s too fast. Bullets hiss. His weight crashes into me. Our entangled
bodies hit the ground. A warm gush of wet red seeps into my clothing.

Chapter 18

Wetness dribbling between my
breasts. A flash of red disappearing into the woods. Jane.

Oh god. Kyle. Oh god, oh god, oh
god.

The wetness rolls down to my
stomach. I think I might be hit. I don’t know. I can’t breathe.

Two discordant strides pound
closer.

I push Kyle off me and twist onto
my hands and knees. I don’t want to look, but I grab at my shirt and yank up.
My hands are shaky as hell, and I can’t get the fabric over my head.

Visions dance in front of my eyes—ragged
bullet holes in my chest; blood spewing out.

I pull, and the fabric rips. My
fingertips follow the dark stain of blood down my chest.

Oh god, oh god, oh god.

A figure rushes behind me into the
woods. The second set of steps comes to a halt.

“Maya,” Gabe puts a hand on my
shoulder.

“Don’t touch me!” I flinch away
from him.

“You’re not hit…fuck, are you?”

“I don’t know.” My voice is edging
toward hysteria. I’m blinking like a spaz, wheezing out tight breathes through
my closed throat. I can’t feel my legs. Maybe I’m paralyzed. Wait, I can feel
them, a little, I think.

Gabe reaches for me again.

“No! Just let me do it.”

Gabe takes a step back. He waits. I
finish probing the blood trail — it’s not nearly so much blood as I thought at
first — and find no bullet holes in my own flesh. I stand up, sway a little,
and carefully wipe my lips and cheek. My hand comes back smeared scarlet.
Kyle’s blood.

I take a deep, long breath. Kyle.

He lies at my feet, a halo of red
around his heart and a dark quarter punched through his skull just above his
left brow. Those misaligned features of his face are twisted even further out
of harmony. His eyes are open and so is his mouth. Dark globules of brain fleck
the exit wound in his forehead.

I go back down to my knees and
slide his eyelids closed, because this is always what they do in the movies. For
some idiotic reason, I can’t reconcile how he is dead when he was alive just
moments ago. I keep expecting him to smile, to laugh.

Even after Ryan, after watching my
brothers take down several other angels, I still don’t understand how something
so big, so important, so solid as a personhood can be severed in a single
moment. Maybe I should close Kyle’s mouth too, but a cold, heavy dread is
filling my limbs, and I just can’t touch him again.

You killed people
,
I
think to him as if in explanation.
You were an angel. I’m so sorry.

I keep wiping at the blood on my
face.

Tarren re-emerges from the woods.

“She’s gone,” he says.

I look around for the purple
balloon, and finally find it, scraping along the ground a couple of yards away;
struggling to stay afloat. It’s just a balloon. I know that.

***

My brothers argue.

“What the fuck were you thinking
running after her like that?” Gabe whispers. Using his phone, he takes pictures
of the postcard collage on Jane and Kyle’s wall.

“You missed your shot,” Tarren
growls back from their bedroom. He opens the closet and roughly pushes through
Jane’s beautiful clothes.

“I didn’t miss.” Gabe’s energy
grows bright. He snatches Jane’s purse off the coffee table, turns, and
stumbles over the book she had left on the floor. “Shit!” He catches himself.
“I had to pull my shot. That guy was jumping Maya.”

“I had him.”

“I know, but —”

“You made a bad decision.” Tarren
pulls open the drawers of a small bureau one by one and probes through Kyle’s
folded shirts, pants, and underwear with his gloved hands. “And now we’ve got a
live angel who knows what Maya looks like, what she is. She could try and
retaliate. She could communicate with Grand.”

Gabe stops what he’s doing, turns
around, and stares at his brother through the open doorway.

Tarren notices. He closes each
drawer softly. A framed photo of Jane and Kyle locked in a sweet kiss wobbles
on top of the bureau. Tarren says, “We don’t have time for this.”

“It wasn’t a bad decision,” Gabe
insists quietly. “Maya was in danger. I had to pull my shot. Then you go all
kamikaze after that angel. She could have turned on you, iced you.
That
was
a bad decision. That was…” Gabe’s aura pulses outward in jagged tides of red.
“…Tarren, don’t do that shit. Just don’t.” His voice dwindles.

Tarren closes the last drawer of
the bureau too hard, and the photo of Jane and Kyle falls on its face.

And me? I’m standing outside the
trailer, wrapped in Gabe’s long brown duster, keeping watch. I wasn’t supposed
to hear any of that or be peeking in the window between the blinds.

***

They decide to sit on the trailer
all night waiting to see if Jane will return. I know she won’t. I tell the boys
as much, but Tarren’s in no mood to hear it. As soon as we make it back to the
SUV, he grabs a pair of high-powered binoculars and his rifle from the trunk
and turns to leave.

“Wait.” Gabe rummages in the glove
compartment and holds out a Power Bar. Tarren scowls. Their energies are both
bright, angry, fighting silently against each other.

It’s not cold, but I can’t stop
shivering.

Tarren snatches the bar from Gabe,
turns, and sulks away without a word. Gabe leans back against the car, looks at
me, and says, “What the hell is wrong with us?”

I look down at my blood-splattered
chest. “I need some towelettes,” I inform him.

***

The afternoon fades into dusk, and
we’re here for the long haul. After changing into a new bra and shirt, I lie
across the SUV’s backseat, while Gabe sits up front working to crack into the
laptop he pulled from Jane and Kyle’s trailer. When he does, he hooks it up to
his own and initiates a full data transfer while watching the feeds from the
cameras he set up around their trailer.

We’ll do right by you Little
One.
Why can’t I get Kyle’s words out of his head? Why won’t that little
reel of imaginary footage—us strolling down the boardwalk—stop flickering
through my mind? They could have changed me. We could have fed on heroine
dealers and traveled all around the country together.

I pick at my fingers until they
bleed.

Gabe methodically combs through
Jane’s purse. He hasn’t removed the gloves that he and Tarren both donned
before entering Jane and Kyle’s trailer.

“No phone,” he says after a minute
of searching. “Remember if she had it on her?”

“Yes.” She’d pulled it out to check
the time.

Gabe is quiet, thinking. “That’s
not good,” he finally announces. He looks back at me. I just shrug.

We’ll do right by you Little
One.

The Lamp of Destiny
starts
and ends. I ignore Gabe’s aura, the tantalizing notes of music that make me
ache. I remember what Kyle told me. Unless I feed on human energy, the hunger
will never get better; the song will never fade.

Toward morning, it is decided that
Gabe and I will dispose of the body while Tarren stays on point at the trailer.

“Just don’t do anything stupid,”
Gabe demands over the phone after they have spent five minutes arguing. His
aura is prickly. “If she comes back, peg her at a distance…Swear it….On Mom’s
grave…” He waits. My hands glow a little. “Okay,” he says softly, “good.”

While I wait in the SUV and watch
the feeds on his laptop, Gabe sneaks back into the trailer and replaces all the
things he and Tarren took. When Gabe returns to the car, he pulls out his
phone. I recognize the number he’s dialing.

“No,” I tell him.

“Lo might want the body.”

“No.” I shake my head. No one is
cutting up Kyle.

Gabe looks at my face and cancels
the call.

***

Gabe and I bury Kyle about two
hours outside of Dallas. The shifting soil makes this a difficult grave to dig.
The temperature keeps dropping. Gabe sweats despite the cold and sheds his
duster. Steam rises up off his exposed skin. Gabe is not big or as ripped as
Tarren, but he is strong. Tight, lean muscles tense along his shoulders,
triceps, and forearms as he digs.

The digging does nothing to dampen
the march of my thoughts.

We’ll do right by you Little
One.

I wonder if Jane—wherever she ran
to—is crying torrents of tears or is still too numb for it yet. I wonder if she
feels the way I did the night Grand killed Ryan in front of me. Is her
desolation just as black? Blacker? They’d been married for so many years.

Maybe she didn’t actually see Kyle
get shot. Maybe she’s still holding onto the barest thread of hope.

Oh god.
I don’t think I’ll
ever sleep again.

Gabe gives me a searching gaze when
he thinks I’m not looking.

“I’m fine!” I snap at him.

“Maya, it’s alright to…”

“I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine.”

“Okay,” Gabe says quietly and pulls
up another shovelful of earth. “You don’t have to…”

“What?”

“Be like Tarren. Please don’t be
like him.” Gabe’s energy blooms with yellow, the color of daffodils. The color
he reserves for Tammy, for his mother, for the father he never knew. The color
of loss.

This night needs to end. For some
crazy reason, I become convinced that the sun won’t come up until Kyle is
buried. I dig with a fury, like something possessed.

Gabe calls me to stop, and I see
that the grave is open before us.

I tell him to back off, and maybe
I’ve got a little of Tarren’s growls inside me somewhere, because Gabe nods and
gets the hell out of my way. I open up the trunk and wrap the tarp around
Kyle’s body, hiding that funny face forever. I take my time laying him in the
grave, making sure he’s in a comfortable, respectable position.

We’ll do right by you Little
One.

When I climb back out, Gabe picks
up his shovel.

I shake my head. “Let me do it.”

“Fine,” he says. He’s standing out
of the bright cut of our headlights, but I can still see his face, how worn he
looks.

I attack the pile of dirt we’ve
amassed, throwing it down onto the shapeless form that was Kyle only a short
time ago. When the grave is filled, I beat the earth down with the underside of
my shovel. A small, discolored hump is the footprint of our work tonight.

“Go ahead, do your thing,” Gabe
says. He leans up against the Murano, shivering in his coat.

I drop down on my knees next to the
pile of upturned soil. The night is dark against my eyelids.
You are a sheep
in wolf’s clothing
, Kyle’s ghost whispers from beneath the earth.

For a long time I kneel, and the
words don’t come; only this terrible, ringing silence. Gabe waits, but I can
feel the impatient pulses of his energy. I press my hand into the sandy dirt
and think, R
est in peace my friend. Forgive me for what I had to do.

It’s terribly lame. Kyle deserves a
better sendoff, but I’m out of time and out of words. I stand up and dust off
my knees even though I’m still wearing my blood-splattered jeans. When I turn
around, Gabe hands me a bottle of water.

“Sit up front,” he says, and I just
nod and follow him to the SUV.