Landing (23 page)

“This is some bad shit,” he says.

“Yeah,” I reply.

You’d expect a genius to speak in a
more highfalutin manner, but that’s just not Lo. He’s crass, horny as hell, and
can’t be a day over sixteen. He has money too, and probably knows more about
angels than any of us after having sliced and diced so many of the corpses Gabe
and Tarren bring him.

He might also hold the key to
turning me back into a human, though I have some pretty strong doubts about
what he and Tarren have really been doing at Lo’s lab in Las Vegas.

Speaking of Tarren, he will
absolutely slaughter me when he finds out that I gave Dr. Lee’s address to Lo.
I’m not even sure why Lo insisted on coming down. He and Gabe hate each other.

“You haven’t heard from Tarren?” I
ask again, though I doubt the answer’s changed since our morning call.

“Nah. Can’t say I blame him for
running. This is depressing as hell.” Lo’s eyes flinch toward the bed then jump
to me. “You do this to him?”

“What? No. Of course not.” My voice
is somewhere in chipmunk range.

Lo’s dark eyes hang on my face. He
blinks and blinks again. His distrust is obvious, but I don’t really blame him.
His violent, abusive father was an angel who was getting ready to turn Lo when
Gabe and Tarren rescued him in the nick of time. Who’s really going to let
something like that go; try to see the different shades of the angel rainbow?

“Whatever,” Lo says. He tosses a
small black satchel to me. I look at him, and when he nods, I open it and stare
at the wads of cash inside.

“Ten grand, all small bills.”

I don’t say anything.

“Trust me, it won’t be missed.
Carmen spends this in a day at the spa,” Lo says. I remember his feisty,
drunken stepmother and don’t doubt his claim.

“Why?” I ask.

Lo rolls his eyes. “Don’t make me
get all sentimental.” His deep voice is gruff, and what he won’t say out loud
is braiding reds, oranges, and yellows through his aura. As much as Lo tries
(way too hard) to emote a mixture of bad ass and modern day Casanova in a
leather jacket, he’s still just a kid dealing out of his depth like the rest of
us.

“Look, this takes money,” Lo
continues and waves in the general area of the bed without looking at its
occupant. “I got it, and that outfit you’re wearing tells me you obviously
don’t. Tarren and Gabe saved my life. I owe ‘em. Both of them.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. Really.
Tarren’ll give it right back if he finds out. Trust me. Just…get him better.”
Lo waves his hand in Gabe’s direction again. He blinks rapidly. “And tell
Tarren to call me when he comes around. I got some shit to discuss with him.
It’s important.”

“About the cure?” My voice is high
and preening. The sudden flush of emotion in my chest surprises me.

Lo smirks, and his aura, that
rushing whirl of color, jumps. “Something like that. Just have him call me.” Lo
looks at Gabe, and this time his eyes linger for a full second. His mouth curls
inward, and he throws open the door and stomps out.

***

Each day, Gabe gets a little
stronger. You wouldn’t know it by his skeletal body, his pale, slack face, or
those eyes, so heavily closed, but I watch his aura grow. What was once the
thinnest thread of life expands to a finger’s width and glows a cloudy gray.

On the fifth day, I catch a tiny
shiver of movement within that gray. And this, at last, is proof to me that his
brain is starting to kick back in, that my brother is still somewhere within
that wasted shell of a body.

Francesca checks on Gabe before
leaving for class. She lays out a banana, bagel, and glass of orange juice on
the nightstand for me, which I’ll promptly throw away as soon as she leaves.

“He’s dreaming,” I tell her.

“You think so?”

I watch Gabe’s aura closely.
“Yeah.”

“What do you think he’s dreaming
about?”

You in a Princess Leia bikini
.
“I don’t know.”

Francesca brushes the back of
Gabe’s hand with her fingers. I envy her the ease of that simple touch. “Sweet
dreams,” she says to him, all beauty and gentleness.

In the afternoon, the sunlight
climbs up over the bed, slides across Gabe’s shoulder to his face, and reaches
up to try and break the clasps on his eyelids. His aura responds, ticking deep,
misty grays. Higher. Faster.  

Each time his energy ticks, I scoot
my chair a little closer.

Tick. Scoot.
Please, please,
please wake up and be Gabe.

Tick. Scoot.
Smile. Laugh. Keep
me company on the roof. Get Tarren to come home.

Tick. Scoot.
Find your blue
again. Forgive me. Oh god, please forgive me.

When Gabe’s eyes slowly open, I’m
right next to him, almost peering over him. His eyelids only come up half way,
and he stares at the ceiling. Blinks slowly. Francesca’s warnings knock around
in my brain.
Oxygen deprivation, brain damage, amnesia, confusion, seizures,
catatonic lapses.

“Gabe?” I say softly. I want to
touch his arm, kiss his face, but I haven’t the right. I shouldn’t be allowed
anywhere near him, honestly.

He makes a soft noise and paws
weakly at the feeding tube.

“Oh yeah, let me.”

Dr. Lee has told me how to remove
the feeding tube just in case he isn’t around when Gabe wakes up the first
time. The doctor is around; just down the hall in his office, but I don’t go to
get him. I’m not sure this is real yet. I also don’t want Dr. Lee here if Gabe
remembers; if my brother accuses me, hates me, throws me out of his heart just
like I deserve.

I gently tug the tape from Gabe’s
dry, cracked lips, pinch the tube and pull it up. Gabe makes soft gagging
noises, but I don’t think he can really feel it. Dr. Lee and Francesca have
been spraying a numbing agent in his throat to deaden the natural gag reflex.

When the tube comes out, I wipe his
chin and moisten his lips with a damp cloth.

He turns his head toward me, and
his eyes are more open, those brown pools filled with flakes of gold. These at
least have not changed, have not drained of color or lost their vibrancy.

“Don’t try to speak,” I say, “Just
listen. I love you so much. We all do. We’ve missed you. We want you to get
better.”
And I swear I wasn’t really trying to kill you. I swear I meant to
pull away sooner.

His eyes are unfocused. I don’t
think he understands, but then he whispers, “I can’t swallow.”

“I know.”

He stares at me for a long time.
“Maya.”

When he says my name, I can’t
believe how all these bells got inside my head and how loud they sound ringing
in unison.

“Did I get hurt?” Gabe rasps. His
words are hardly more than air.

I nod. “But you’re okay now.” My
voice is leaping pitches and getting all trembly.

“Tarren,” he says.

“He’s fine. He went running to
clear his head.”

“Tammy?”

I reach out for Gabe’s hand and
then stop myself. “She died. Years ago.”

“I thought she was here... I heard
her voice.”

“You were dreaming.”

He struggles to take this in. “I
can’t...feel my body.” His voice gives out. He tries again. “Maya, is it real
bad?”

“You just need to rest more. You
can go back to sleep. I won’t leave, I promise.”
Unless you want me to
because you can’t stand the sight of me.

“Where’s Tarren?”

“We killed Grand. Do you remember
anything?”

His lids are creeping down. “Killed
him?”

“Yeah, you and me Gabe. He’s gone…”
Gabe is asleep. “…forever.”

My hands are shaking as I dial the
number of the phone in Gabe’s truck. One ring. Two rings.

He picks up.

“Tarren?”

Silence.

“Gabe is awake. Come home. Please.”

I hear a soft exhalation of breath across
the other line. Abruptly, I know it’s not Tarren. He just doesn’t breathe that
way.

“Who is this?” I ask. “Where’s—”

The call cuts out. I listen to the
nothing, wondering what this means and if it could be anything but bad. After a
while, I get around to dropping the phone and then run out of the room to find
Dr. Lee.

Chapter 35

Gabe wakes up in short spurts over
the next day. Sometimes he recognizes us, sometimes he doesn’t. He calls out
for Tammy again and both of his parents. Sometimes he doesn’t say anything at
all, and just stares at us with big, doleful eyes that seem to take up his
entire face. Once he thinks Francesca has been killed by angels and spends an
hour wracked by sobs while she sits on the edge of the bed and comforts him.

“The angels took her,” Gabe
whispers to her between hiccups. “I was going to build her a porch swing. We
were going to get married.”

“Shhhhh,” Francesca says.

Another time Gabe jolts awake and
immediately tries to pull the IV out of his hand. He gets aggressive when I
stop him. Incoherent words and grunts spill out of his mouth. I feel the bones
shifting under the parchment of his skin as he weakly struggles against my
hold. Suddenly, I’m back in the warehouse. Gabe is clawing at my arm while his
energy flows through my body. I shake away the vivid, brutal images and the
echoes of his screams. Even now, with Gabe as weak and helpless as he is, a
part of me only wants to give in. Feed. Finish what I started.

Francesca answers my shouts and
administers a sedative. When Gabe drops into unconsciousness, I arrange him
back on his pillows and ask Francesca for some water. When she leaves, I stare
out the window and realize that I don’t even know what day of the week it is,
or even if October has given way to November.

I’m hungry and tired and feel
gross. Francesca promises to stay with Gabe until I return, so I walk the two
miles back to the house.

I’m grateful for the dulling power
of exhaustion. The day is cold and clear, and little snow flurries spin and
dance around me, melting the instant they touch my skin. It’s like cold kisses.

I imagine that the first snowflakes
would also be falling in Connecticut right about now. The trees would all be
naked, and some dreamy little girl who is no longer me would stare out the window
and think about how sad and forlorn those trees looked, huddled together to
wait out the season of starvation and cold.

I turn the bend and see, a quarter
mile away, Gabe’s truck in the driveway. Every part of me goes taut, like a bow
being strung.

I’ve already managed to compile a
small cache of theories about what has happened to Tarren; how a stranger got a
hold of the phone in his truck. Some of these theories are inane, but most are
not. Sure, he could be staying with friends or could have ditched the truck of
his own free will, but I can’t stop picturing him iced in some anonymous
alleyway, because Gabe and I weren’t there to watch his back. The angel who
killed him would have rifled through his pockets, just like I do with all our
clipped wings and would have found the keys to the truck and then the phone in
the dashboard.

…Except the truck is here. At our
house. Which means Tarren’s back.

Or he broke under torture, and this
is a trap.

I duck into the shadows of the
trees, wary of every movement and sound that the forest makes. My ears strain
to pick up soft footsteps, hushed whispers, anything that could indicate a team
of angels positioned around the house ready to storm in with god knows what
powers at their command.

I don’t have a gun. Why didn’t I
think to carry a gun?

As I cautiously approach the house,
I catch the tug of Tarren’s energy inside. It could still be a trap, but even
if it isn’t, that doesn’t exactly lessen the peril of my situation. When we
last left off, Tarren was pointing a gun at my face.

When I get to the edge of the
woods, I lean against a solid trunk and try to think this out. Instead of
finding answers, my mind re-churns over the old questions.
How am I going to
face him? How can I make him understand? Does he still want to kill me?

I weave through our practice range,
stepping over fallen soup cans and half-buried bullets, and then sprint across
the yard to the house. I crouch low under the window. On my hands and knees, I
crawl around the house, honing in on Tarren’s energy, until I find him in the
kitchen.

I raise myself up to peek in the
window. The blinds are down, of course, but the one is bent, opening up a small
wedge of viewing. Tarren sits at the kitchen table, leaning over a book. His
back is to me. I can’t see his face, but his aura is improved. That terrible
black molasses has lightened into a spoiled brown with pale hints of blue at
the core. What I don’t see is much red. He isn’t hurt. He isn’t bleeding.
There’s no rage or the wild yellows and oranges of guilt and anger.

I listen carefully for any hint of
others in hiding, but there is nothing except the normal groans and rattles of
the house. Tarren is alone.

I watch him for a long time, and he
is so calm, moving only to turn the page. I catch sight of bandages under the
cuff of his long sleeved shirt. He’s got a gun stuck in his belt, but both his
hands are on the table. I don’t get this at all, which makes me nervous.

Alright, I was already nervous.
This quiet, composed Tarren makes me nervouser.

I wait longer than I should,
because I just want to keep things nice and peaceful like this.

You promised to save him,
I
think to myself, and my heartfelt determination from that night in the clearing
seems so naïve, almost laughable now.
Like anything could be that simple.

Eventually I stand up, go round to
the back door, and open it slowly.

Tarren looks up from his book. I
watch his hands, but they stay on top of the table. I pull the door closed
behind me, but keep my hand on the knob.

We look at each other, and there’s
just such a gaping chasm between us. It’s mostly my fault, but there are things
he has to answer for too.

One of us must eventually speak.

“When did you get in?” I ask.

“A couple hours ago,” Tarren
replies. His face is pale and riven with exhaustion, and the welt on his neck
has dissolved into wan shades of yellow and green. A shallow cut on his
forehead is healing. But he’s shaved and smells of the Dial soap he prefers. I
think that’s important. I wonder if he’s been up to his room yet, seen the new,
unbroken mirror I hung in his closet.

“Gabe woke up,” I say.

“I know. I got your message.”

“He’s asked for you.”

Tarren closes the book, something
about solar power, of all things. “How is he?”

“You would already know if you
hadn’t run away.”

Tarren accepts this blow, and I
know I shouldn’t—all the good parts of me want to just skip this—but I bristle.

“You left. You left him,” I accuse.

“I know.”

“You didn’t pick up your phone. I
had no idea where you were, if you were okay, I was…” I stop there. Some part
of me can’t say the rest out loud. Instead, I go with, “Who answered your
phone?”

Tarren is quiet, and I can see in
the pattern of his aura that he won’t give me a straight answer. He says, “I
understand why you lied about the two injections.”

Oh shit on a stick
. Tarren
remembers everything. Our confrontation in the woods. The bitch-slap-fest on
the side of the highway. The telekinesis I pulled with the gun. Even if Gabe
doesn’t remember all the hate I poured upon him, Tarren will be more than happy
to remind him.

“You’re right,” Tarren says, and
I’m convinced for a second that he’s learned to read minds. Except then he
finishes his sentence. “I would have killed you that first night if I had
known.”

“You said once…” I swallow, or at
least try to swallow, “that angels are human. They just exhibit severely
progressed expressions of innate human potential.”

“You heard that.”

I nod, try to look Tarren in the
eyes, but don’t get very far. I can tell he’s going over that conversation he
had with Lo when they first started testing me. According to Lo, I was an
angel, a homicidal time bomb waiting to go off. Tarren had defended me, sort
of.

And then it comes to me; a very
small way to try and save Tarren. I’m going to stop lying to him. I know exactly
where to start. The auras.

“There’s uh, something you should
know,” I stammer, still not looking at him, “about me. I don’t just feel
energy, I see it…I can see...” This is so hard. Giving up my secrets to someone
who won’t hesitate to use them against me.

“Colors,” Tarren says.

I pull in a sharp breath, and my
muscles go all rigid in my legs and arms.

“Auras,” I say, “emotions.”

Tarren just nods. His face is so
passive and unimpressed that it’s obvious he’s known all along. That’s why he’s
so good at controlling his aura; at keeping his feelings at bay.

It’s just as obvious to me that
Gabe doesn’t have a clue. He would have mentioned it before. He would control
his aura better.

My mind rushes with the
implications of this discovery. Tarren knows more than Gabe about angels. A lot
more. Almost intimate things about how we work. The auras. The scented
blindfold.
But how?

Tammy,
my mind blurts.
He
never actually said that he killed her.
No. No way. That would be
ludicrous. Impossible…

“Maya,” Tarren says, and I realize
that the silence has stretched between us. I push away all thoughts of Tammy
like they were hot coals. I’ll think about this later, sometime when I can be
alone and when my mind isn’t a wreck.

“Look,” Tarren starts.

“We’ve got a lot of shit here
between us,” I interrupt. “We’ve both done things to each other, unforgivable
things…”

“Don’t,” he starts.

“I know what you want.” I raise my
voice over his. “You want us to lock this away, to let it just fester. That’s
how you handle everything—”

“I forgive you.” Tarren says this
very quietly.

“What?”

Tarren runs his finger over the
embossed title of the book. “I forgive you. Everything.”

My brain struggles to compute his
words and fails. “I don’t understand.”

Tarren finally looks up at me. His
eyes are pale, almost colorless. “Gabe would have gone with your plan if he’d
known. He would have risked his life. He would have done anything.”

This is how I imagine it would feel
to have a sledgehammer punch right through my chest. Because Tarren is right,
and I never would have realized it. I look at him, and I understand what he’s
offering to me. Not just his own forgiveness, but Gabe’s forgiveness as well.

Tarren, my brother Tarren who has
hated me his entire life, lifts the lead crown of guilt off my head.

“Thank you,” I whisper. “You need
to go see Gabe.”

“I will.”

“He’s going to be alright,” I
insist. I let go of the doorknob and take a wobbly step forward.

“Maya.” Tarren takes the book in
his hands. Those pale eyes hold me in place like nails. “Don’t ever forgive me
for what I’ve done, or for what I may still do.”

It’s a true testament to just how
fucked we are, the two of us, that I nod and, as a sign of my gratitude, give
Tarren what he wants. “Okay, I won’t.”

“Not ever, Maya.”

“Not ever,” I promise.

He nods then, just a little.

I walk out of the kitchen, leaving
Tarren at the table with his book. I feel light-headed and unsteady as I go up
the stairs. I need a shower, sweet scalding water to wash this greasy film off
my skin, but instead, I make it to my room, collapse on the bed, and drop
immediately into a long, heavy sleep.