Leaping (15 page)

The journey toward consciousness is a slow crawl through
murky water toward a slipshod shore. I feel the energy close.

Living.

Throbbing.

Beckoning to me.

I reach for it over and over, stretching out my fingertips
just to graze it. Almost there. Then it backs away like a teasing sprite.

A single dream wraps itself around my brain. Rain is still
missing. Where is he? Salt Lake City? Oakland? Knoxville? We’ve been to all
these cities, walked all these streets, crashed in cheap motel rooms, and
buried bodies. I forget who’s on the search team and start assigning old acquaintances
and celebrities to the search. Johnny Depp and Leonardo DeCaprio are on my
search team, naturally. Tarren gets my adopted mother, Karen because their
names rhyme and that is somehow significant. He also gets Michael Wilkens, the
guy I had the hugest crush on in fifth grade. Gabe gets my old college
roommate, Lucy, because I think they’d get along great, and Natalie Portman who
has made the poor decision to show up in her tutu and ballet shoes directly
from
Black Swan.

As we search, the background shifts behind us from sand to
tall pine trees to unforgiving granite cliffs. And it comes to me suddenly. I
know where Rain is. Ryan has taken him. My murdered ex-boyfriend was jealous.
His skeletal hands have plunged up through the wet, glistening soil and dragged
Rain down into his coffin to suffocate.

Energy lights up the sky, licking at my consciousness,
blowing away the scene before it reforms and I have to start all over again.
Something new is also rising to the surface. A deep, dull throbbing, like a
drum inside my body.

Over time, the pain localizes, shrinking until the drum is
inside my right shoulder.

I remember the gun shot. My eyes inch open. They feel
unwieldy, my eyelids, like they could just slip closed at any moment. Skeletal
hands still reach out in the back of my mind as I take in a pocked, dingy
ceiling and breathe in strident scents of rubbing alcohol. I turn my face and
feel a pillow beneath my head.

Energy. The feel of it is so familiar that I intuitively
know who it is even before his name forms in my sluggish mind. For a minute I
just watch his energy, the heavy oranges that pierce the blue. Then I blink and
study the figure within. He kneels on the floor near the foot of my bed. At
first I think he is praying, but this is wrong. Tarren doesn’t pray. Faith is
hope, and hope is too dangerous. His hands are moving, picking something out of
the carpet. Pieces of something.

I try to rise, but my arms are unwieldy, and pain washes
through me like millions of tiny spikes running through each vein. I can see
now that my wrists are tightly cinched together by five plastic ties and rest
on my stomach, like I am carrying an invisible bouquet.

Five. Five plastic ties. Tarren and I tested this out last
year. I was able to break through three ties around my wrists. The magic number
to bind me should have been four, but of course Tarren would use five.

“You tranqed me,” I mumble, still trying to keep my lids up.

Every drum beat of pain seems to rattle my thoughts into
smoke.

Tarren’s energy changes, calming down into a smooth shell of
dark blue, all those oranges swept away into that big, impenetrable vault he
keeps inside himself. He moves. I follow the feel of his energy as he approaches.
A hand touches my back, and my body tenses like stone.
That energy.
He
props me up, quickly removing his hand when I’m situated. An open water bottle
hovers in front of my face, wrapped by his long fingers.

“Slow,” he says.

I am thirsty. Suddenly so thirsty, like I haven’t had a
drink in years, like my whole body is made of sand. I grab the bottle between
my hands so hard that it gushes water into my lap, but then I have my lips
around the edge and gulp it down in quick, heavy slugs.

When I’m done, I feel something else in the room. Fainter
throbs of energy. I understand. “Give them to me.” The words are more a growl
than I meant, but my body is desperate. The monster is close to the surface,
and despite the pain, my muscles tense.

Tarren nods and walks across the room. When he returns with
a small box in his hands, my hands are straining against the ties, and I’m
panting.

“Hold your hands out,” he says.

His words barely make sense. I have to translate them
through the veil of hunger. I turn my hands up and hold them out, noticing that
the glove is missing on my left hand. The skin has peeled back from my palm, and
the feeding bulb is out, throbbing with heat and light.

Tarren opens the cardboard box and pulls out a white rat by
its tail. He drops it into my palms and steps back. Whatever else he does is
lost. I wrap my fingers around the squealing creature, and the bulb of my left
hand latches instinctively onto its aura.
Ahhhhhhhh.
Its energy streams
through me like a salve. The heavy drumbeat of pain softens, and my body is
rigid with a pleasure that is over all too soon.

“More,” I gasp out, dropping the limp rat into my lap and
holding out my hands again. My body vibrates with need. Tarren’s energy is so
big, so beautiful. So much better than the second rat he dangles above my
palms. I wish…I want….the second rat drops, and my thoughts blow away again,
and more energy pours into me.

When four cold rat corpses litter my lap, Tarren sets the
empty cardboard box on a small table in the corner of the room and studies me.
I shiver as the monster part of me screams for more, more, MORE! But I also
feel my thoughts starting to cohere, the Maya part of me creeping out of the
fog of drugs and pain.

After a time, maybe just a minute or a whole handful of
them, Tarren steps back up to the bed. He offers me a second water bottle and
picks the dead rats from my lap. Only when I lower the second weightless bottle
do I realize that my shirt is gone, and I’m showing off the blotchy pink sports
bra that Gabe sabotaged at the laundromat with his crimson Flash t-shirt. My
chest and left shoulder are both swathed in white tape. In a fit of panic, I rip
the sheets off my lap and see that my blood-splattered pants are still on. Even
my black sneakers.
Thank you Jesus.
I don’t know if I could ever look
Tarren in the eye again knowing he’d seen my white, butterfly print panties.

 “The bullet went into your back, through the scapula.
Missed your lungs,” my brother says. His eyes and face are intense. “You were
lucky it was a 9 millimeter. If you’d been hit with a 45, you would have bled
out.  

“Are you okay?” I blurt, remembering all those dreams of
reaching for energy, his energy, again and again. “Did I hurt you?”

“I’m fine,” Tarren responds. His aura is a steely blue, held
under rigid control.  

That’s all he’s going to say about that, the sloppy fight,
the five plastic ties that were evidently necessary during the surgery, and
whatever I might have said or done in my drugged state.

“You fixed me up?” My voice is slow and uncertain, my
thoughts still moving slow. Before Tarren can respond, a new thought hits me.
“Where’s Gabe?” I look around the small, drab room as if he could somehow be here
without me feeling his energy.

“Still hiding. We’re in contact.” Tarren says.

I think this must mean I’ve only been out for a few hours,
but when I look at the surprisingly beautiful and delicate clock on the
nightstand and struggle to do the calculation, I realize that almost half a day
has passed. I swing my head back to Tarren, and my fingers press into the sides
of the water bottle in my lap, filling the room with the heavy noise of
buckling plastic.

“Still hiding?”

Tarren wears his calm mask, the one that can hide almost
anything. I’m pretty sure he would stare down an oncoming nuclear shockwave
with this same expression.  

“The first responders picked up three bodies,” he says. “The
entire neighborhood is locked down.”

***

It actually gets worse. Tarren flips on the local news. The
ancient, boxy television takes a few moments to warm up, and then there it is,
the headline story of the day. A grave, jowly male reporter sits next to a
tight-faced woman who looks like she’s fighting forty with every weapon modern
cosmetic surgery has to offer. Big text blares, BREAKING NEWS! THREE DEAD
CONFIRMED. The screen flips to a young female reporter wearing a heavy coat
that doesn’t seem necessary for the mild temperatures. She stands in front of a
long strip of police tape. The colors from a nearby police car wash over her as
she speaks gravely into the microphone. I have trouble following the fast
staccato of her words. 

“At least three fatalities,” she says. Other phrases
resonate. “Enraged gang. Designer drugs. Strange lights.”

“They have a video,” Tarren says, standing next to the bed. As
if waiting for his cue, the screen flips back to Jowly who grumbles a few lines
and a warning about the graphic nature of the clip to come. A jerky video
splashes on the screen, obviously taken on a cell phone with shaky hands. I see
a pair of shoes.

“Frank, don’t! They have guns,” a female voice shouts from behind
the screen. The video sweeps up toward a window. The faint light spilling out
of the window does little to pierce the darkness. Frank is a lurking shadow
with his baseball bat. And then I make my appearance, a dark streak with
streaming hair, ducking beneath the swing of Frank’s bat. And then I’m gone.

“She didn’t get my face. Did she get my face?” I look to
Tarren in desperation.

My brother stares expressionless at the screen. I look back.
My pack of trailing angels are descending.

“Frank, I’m videoing,” The woman calls.

The angels are muted blurs in the darkness. Heather is in
the lead, her long legs eating up ground despite her heeled boots. She ignores
Frank and his pitiful baseball bat. So does War, close behind her. The third
angel, limping behind doesn’t ignore Frank. His head snaps to attention, eyes trained
on the balding, middle-aged man in flannel pants and no shirt.

The darkness hides the angel’s expression, but I can image
the feral glint in his eyes. The sudden rush of need and addiction.  

“His hands,” Tarren says.

It’s a little hard to make out, but yes, when I look closely
I see a faint glow emanating near the angel’s waist.  

The angel, a mop of dark curls catching the weak light from
the window, pounces on Frank like a cat. The woman behind the camera screams.
Another dark figure enters the scene, and this one turns toward the window. A
woman. Tall and thin, with short steel-colored hair.
Cherry Red Infinity,
I
think.

The long, screeching howl of fear continues as Cherry Red
Infinity advances toward the window just outside the pool of light. The view
suddenly shifts, blurring and then resolving into clean, wooden floorboards.
The sound of a shattering window is followed by winking shards of glass raining
down into the camera’s view.

“She dropped the phone!” I gasp, and despite the horrific
scene, this feels like a miracle. Like the descending blade of the guillotine
got stuck when your neck was on the block. My emotions are all over the place.
Fear and relief do an odd tango together in my chest. “Do you think the angels
can cover it up?”

In their heyday, the first generation of angels, who called
themselves
The Exalted
without apparently realizing what pompous
assholes that made them, specialized in covering up all of their murderous
mayhem. The Exalted were men with stars on their collars, women who worked in
posh corner offices in the Capital, and others who could pull important
strings. These acolytes covered up murders committed by angels, disappeared
police reports, scrubbed autopsies, and quickly dispatched anyone who stumbled
upon the truth, including people like Dr. Lee who had the unfortunate luck to
receive an angel patient in his emergency room.

“Their network is far weaker than it used to be,” Tarren
responds. “The video is out. The story is out. One of the bodies they picked up
was an angel. We’ve crossed a line.”

I shake my head, causing the room to tilt back and forth.
“It was too dark. You can hardly see anything in the video.”

The news shifts to the ongoing investigation into the disappearance
of Tucker Cartwright.  A clip shows weeping female fans dropping flowers and
teddy bears in a lavish pile at the gate in front of his community. They lean
against each other and sob as if all the sunlight has been torn out of the
world. A crude sketch of a skinny man in a Batman costume appears on the
screen.

Jesus.

Tarren stands up as if he needs to move, and even in my
dazed state I know that he’s in a bad place. Gabe is the jittery one, burning
through his nerves with finger tapping and thread tugging. Tarren, ever the
solider, is still and quiet…usually.

I study the lamp shade sitting on the table. Just the shade.

“Say it,” I challenge him.

He turns to me, and I notice the stubble darkening his jaw.
“Say what?” His words are clipped, almost angry. Over his shoulder, I see a
crack snaking along the wall, a crack I’m betting wasn’t there when we arrived.

“Say whatever it is that’s trying to burst out of you.”

Instead, he takes a breath. Probably one of those cleansing
breaths that supposedly works for him. “Can you travel? We need to get to the
rendezvous point to meet Gabe.”

I stare at him, trying to drill through all his ice. He just
stands there, implacable.

“Yes,” I finally say. “Care to cut me loose?”

Improbably, and yet not surprisingly, Tarren leads me to a
new vehicle, an older model Chevy Silverado. The gray truck is slathered with
dirt and grime, hinting at a lifetime of hard fought miles. Tarren usually
prefers stealing newer cars with less wear and tear, but I guess this old truck
did well in a pinch.

I wonder where our jeep, stained with my blood, filled with
ghosts, found its final resting place. I gingerly slide into the passenger seat
while Tarren returns to quickly clean the motel room. Even this small exertion
has me breathing hard and squeezing my eyes closed to shut out a wave of
dizziness. I haven’t felt nearly this horrible since my body was practically
turned inside out when Grand injected me with his bone marrow over a year ago. Right
now I feel like someone siphoned off every ounce of my energy and replaced it
with steel ball bearings. My body feels so heavy I expect the seat to groan and
buckle beneath me. 

The cab of the truck smells like cigarettes, fast food, and
uninspired life decisions. Wires dangle from the steering column. All of our
crap, including the ever resilient Sir Hopsalot in his carrying case, is neatly
stacked in the back seat, allowing just enough space for a passenger. A pile of
bloodied towels and sheets stick out of a big plastic bag, and I realize that
it’s actually pretty spectacular that Tarren performed surgery on me. I know
he’s studied up on basic wound care as we all have, but sewing up a bullet hole
while my blood pumped all over his fingers? I imagine his face, pale and
intense as he made precise, tiny sutures in my flesh.

I can just see the top of the bandages above the collar of
my t-shirt, the discolored blood stains smattering my jeans. Then everything hits
me like a sledgehammer.

I was shot. Holy fucking cheese sticks, I was shot.

I relive the scene, rushing through the yards, blood
pounding in my ears as gunshots crack behind me. This time, I imagine that I
felt the bullet as it spiraled through my flesh, muscle, and bone.  I see blood
gushing out of my body. My heart races, and the spool of images plays over and
over in my mind. The click of the driver’s side door sounds like a bomb, and I
actually cry out.

“What?” Tarren tenses, and his gaze scours the parking lot. “Did
you see something? Hear something?”

“No, no,” I gasp.
It’s just that I was shot.
“It’s…nothing.”

Tarren swings into the driver’s seat, and the trucks dips
with his weight.

“They’ll find my blood at the scene,” I say.

“And if they run it through the database they’ll come up
with a match from your missing person profile,” Tarren finishes, because of
course he’s already thought of this. He’s had half a day to contemplate just
how much we’ve fucked up. “It will take them a while to process the scene. It
might be possible for Gabe or one of his hacker contacts to…” He pauses just a
moment to find the right words. “…take care of that.”

I nod, and we pull out of the parking lot of the old,
modular motel that looks like it’s begging for a bulldozer. I realize that I
never even asked about the motel we were in or how Tarren got me inside the
room. He must have carried me – how else? I wonder if I felt heavy in his arms,
if even in my drugged unconsciousness I still tried to reach up, to feed from
his aura.

Then a whole new carnival of worrying thoughts makes its
sluggish way to my brain.
Why did I say when I was coo-coo for Coco Puffs?
Did
I blab my suspicions about Tammy? Did I mumble Gem’s name and describe the
greatest hits from our weird-ass family reunion earlier this year in Peoria?

I watch Tarren drive, those strong hands at 9 and 3. His
face is closed. What would his aura look like with one more secret added to the
mix? I squint at his energy, but another wave of dizziness hits, and I turn my
head to look out the passenger window. The dawn is almost over, and I can see
just the barest hint of purple night still clinging to the western horizon.
Soon the sun will eat it up.

My mind jumps to a different place. Tarren and I are finally
alone. Right here, right now I could ask him about Tammy. Not ask. Demand
answers. Tell him,
I know she’s alive.

I open my mouth. “Did you feed Sir Hopsalot?” I ask with
utter lameness. “It’s been a long time since…”

“Yes. And I let him out in the motel room. I was planning to
vacuum anyway,” he replies. We ease to a stop at a red light. Tarren stares
straight ahead and says, “We really shouldn’t bring him with us.”

He’s always considered Sir Hopsalot a distraction. Yet
another liability to slow us down.

“In case something happens to us,” Tarren says.

My brother has a way of surprising me like this. I think
I’ve decoded every bit of his software, but then he’ll throw out a curveball of
care my way. Could it be that he actually likes the furry critter?

 “Francesca would take care of him,” Tarren says. “It’s not
good to have an animal stuck in cage for so long.”

 “We’re stuck in a cage too.” The words just pop out of my
mouth, but they’re true. When is the last time we’ve been home?

The light turns green, and we slowly roll to the next light.
Every little jolt of the truck sends a stab of pain through my chest. It feels
like someone spent a day shooting hockey pucks at my right shoulder and upper
ribs. Even breathing hurts, and I take short, quick breaths to compensate.

The road is thick with cars. People trundling off to work.
Computers to clack, phones to answer, paychecks to grudgingly earn.
I was
shot,
I think.
They have a video of an angel. Glowing hands.
And
life goes on. Someone honks nearby, trying to merge into a full turn lane.

“Did you leave some extra money?” I ask. “For the lamp?”

Silence.

More silence.

A stray thread of crimson cuts through Tarren’s aura like an
open wound. His knuckles grow white on the steering wheel.

“I should have seen it,” he says, and his voice is so low
it’s almost more growl than words. “After Peoria of course they would have a
patrol. I should have anticipated it.”

I open my mouth to answer, but Tarren is right. It seems so
obvious now. In Peoria, Gabe and the Totem ambushed the angels and cut down
half their numbers. War is stupid, but even he wouldn’t let something like that
happen again.

“We had to react quickly. We couldn’t think of every
possibility,” I say.

“I HAVE to think of every possibility.” His voice is raw in
such an un-Tarren-like way that it actually scares me. It’s like watching a
crack splice within a massive iceberg. How much more pressure until it
shatters?

When was the last time he slept?
I think. Out loud I
say, “You can’t Tarren. You can’t out-think every situation.”

His hands clench the steering wheel like he’s holding on for
dear life. I watch his aura flare with emotion. Blood reds, crackling oranges.
But is his voice is eerily calm. “You got hurt. Gabe could have been caught by
the police.”

Does he really believe that he alone is responsible for
keeping us safe?
Yes,
I realize,
that’s exactly what he believes.

“You don’t get to do this,” I snap even as I lean away from
the loud fury of his energy. “…this take all the blame thing…” My voice is rising.
“…this, I have to be perfect for every second of every fucking day or all the
kittens in the world will die and sprinkles will disappear forever.”

Silence.

So I fill it.

“And THANK YOU for saving my life, by the way!” I haven’t
re-modulated my voice, so I’m yelling my gratitude at him.

Tarren pulls us into a small, empty parking lot at a desert
nature preserve. Our rendezvous point.

“I left money for the lamp,” he mutters. Ironic that this
makes me feel better even though we’re sitting in a stolen truck. I know Tarren
always checks for insurance before he boosts a car. My attention shifts as I
feel a faint yet familiar energy pattern nearby. A slim figure emerges from
behind the visitor’s center.

Gabe looks like something even a burly truck driver wouldn’t
pick up from the side of the road. His face is caked with dirt and sweat, and
his beat-up old ball cap is an immediate Goodwill reject. And yet when his
trademark grin slides into place, I can’t help thinking that everything will
somehow be okay.

Gabe ambles up to my window.

“I don’t have any change, Sir,” I tell him through the
glass.

“Chuck Norris routinely brings 11 items to the 10
items or less line because he's Chuck Norris,” Gabe responds. Streaks
of green glow in his aura.

Tarren must think we’re both crazy, but I can’t help it. I
giggle, despite the pain it causes in my back and chest. All the stress and
blood loss and the unremitting ache in my arm are doing weird things to my
brain, and here’s Gabe looking like he was literally dragged through the mud,
still grinning.

I roll down the window.

“I got a lot more where that came from,” Gabe says. “Had a
lot of time to think recently.”

“Get in the truck,” Tarren says. He sounds brusque, but Gabe
and I know better.

“Missed you too, big brother,” Gabe says pleasantly. He
looks at me, and his brown eyes turn serious. “How are you? In pain?”

“A little, but it’s not bad,” I lie. “I was worried about
you.”

“Right back at you. Really, Maya, you okay?”

I realize that it must have been hard for him, hunkering
down in a hot attic, listening to our fragmented conversation, that sloppy
fight, through his earpiece. After I was out, Tarren probably gave him clipped,
sterile updates in an unbearably calm voice.

“The arm’s still attached.” I pull down the collar of my
shirt to show off my bandages. “Tarren sewed me up, and you know I heal quick.”

“Thank God.” Gabe opens the door and squeezes into the back,
pushing around all of Tarren’s neat piles so he can stretch out his legs.
“Water. Please. And grub. I’d eat dog food right now.”

***

We park at a gas station just a few miles up the road from
our rendezvous point. Gabe has just returned, his arms filled with glinting
bags of chips, cans of Monster energy drinks, and three soft pretzels powdered
in salt. He smells astringent from the wet clothes he used for a quick homeless
shower in the bathroom. Without all the dust, his face looks drawn and tired.

As soon as we kill War, we need to head home. It’s time for
us to rest. Recuperate. The thought of my own bed almost makes me drool. I
think I could sleep for an entire day.

Gabe situates himself in the back seat, leans forward, and
offers Tarren one of the pretzels.

 “We need to find someone else. Another angel,” Tarren says.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Gabe groans, his mouth
filled with pretzel. “Did you happen to notice how not well the last attempt
went?”

“We have to track War,” I interject. I’ve already repeated
his faith-healer craziness to my brothers on the way here. “He is trying to
start the end times. Literally. First priority is to blow his head off.”

Gabe’s aura ticks with discontent but he doesn’t say
anything. I know my brother gets unhappy when I roll out the violent speech. It
doesn’t suit his narrative of me as his innocent little sister pulled into a
war she was never supposed to be a part of.

“The original plan wasn’t to run across an entire nest of
angels,” Tarren responds, his voice going softer, each word clipped. His
version of anger.

Nest, hmmmm. No, I like murder of angels better. Or maybe a
brood of angels, like vampires. We should probably have a team vote.

“We need to do this first,” Tarren insists.

My anger rises sudden and hot. “What part of THE APOCALYPSE
are you not hearing?”

“Gonna need some juice for this pretty soon,” Gabe mumbles
as his thumb flicks across the screen of his phone.

“If we can track him nearby, we can take him back to Lo,”
Tarren says.

“No, we’re not keeping War alive,” I insist. The last time
War was captured, he broke through his handcuffs and then snapped the neck of Puma,
the Totem’s least pleasant member, like it was a screw top lid. “We need to put
him in the ground. Cut off the snake’s head.”

Tarren carefully brushes the salt off the pretzel Gabe
offered him. I realize that I never asked Tarren if he’d eaten. I’d only asked
about the rabbit. I feel a wave of shame slam into my simmering anger. Gabe and
I have a pact between us to always watch out for Tarren. Make sure he eats and
sleeps, because he often forgets or simply doesn’t consider normal human
necessities relevant.

“Then tell us,” I manage through gritted teeth. “Tell us
what you’re working on. Why it’s so important we need to let angel Hitler
escape.”

“Do we know which car was War’s?” Gabe asks, raising his
voice.

“He would be driving something big. Something flashy,” I
respond.

“Bet it was the black Hummer. Big chrome wheels.”

“That sounds like War,” I agree.

“Let’s see. Oh, look-ee here. Happens to be one of the cars
I put a tracker on. Just another stroke a genius. No big deal…” Gabe’s fingers
dance as he pulls a new screen up on his phone. “He drove it last night. Guess
he made it out of the fray. Hmmm.” An index finger taps against his lips. “The
douche-mobile is two hours outside of Scottsdale. It’s been sitting there for
the entire day. Hold on.”

“Just two hours away,” I plead to Tarren.

“He abandoned the car, Maya,” Tarren says like this is
obvious.

“Yep,” Gabe says from the back. “That address is a used car
dealership. He switched rides.”

“Dammit!” I throw myself against the seat, and my chest
rings with pain. “What about the others in the group?” I manage through gritted
teeth. “We can capture one, lean on them. War must have a network, some sort of
communication ring. Those guys didn’t just all show up at that house
accidentally.”