Leaping (19 page)

Gabe cracks up like I’ve said the funniest thing in the
world. It’s definitely the booze and the stress and the fact that Gabe hates
being mad at me, or pretty much anyone besides Lo. His laughs turn into wild
cackles. I can’t resist, and we both laugh at poor Amelia Earhart’s expense. It
feels good. My bridge with Gabe is still solid, and it needs to be or I think
my entire soul would tumble into the rapids below.

“Two days off sounds good,” Gabe pants. “You go, and I’ll explain
to Tarren when he wakes up. You know, the whole ‘Ask forgiveness instead of
permission thing.’” That pretty much sums up Gabe’s standard operating
procedure.

“Yeah, okay.”

“I’ll hotwire one of Lo’s cars for you.”

“How about I just ask him for the keys?” I need to talk to
the horny boy wonder anyway about building a second Prism. He’ll understand the
logic of having a backup. As to how I’ll get it to Fiona’s farm without raising
suspicions…I’ll figure something out.

“Can’t I just hotwire his Porsche for fun?” Gabe says. His
churning aura is a deep shade of blue like sapphires.
Blue as blue, true as
true.
It was so damn good to hear him laugh.

I give him a wave as I set off for the house.

“Maya,” he calls after me.

I stop and turn back toward him. “Yep?”

“Tell Rain he’s still a fuck up…you know, if you see him.”

I try to look annoyed, but I can’t. It’s Gabe. Instead, I
give him an awkward little nod and head toward the kitchen to have another
delightful conversation with Lo.

I sit carefully with my low back against a tall, sturdy tree
and let the sunshine fall across my body like a warm blanket. The wind plays
through my hair whispering secrets that I can’t decode. I’m glad of it. My
brain can’t take anymore secrets.

It was only a four hour drive from Lo’s mansion outside of
Vegas to Balboa Park near San Diego, but my brain wasn’t quiet for one minute
of that drive. As I drove with my left hand on the wheel, I kept thinking about
War and Raven. How could I have let War escape? When will his army come
sweeping through the land, eating through the human population like locusts? I
see his ugly face in my mind, that low, hoarse voice spouting treachery and
lies. And Raven. Did I make the right decision in protecting her from Tarren?
Is Fiona really who she said she was? I practically traded Gabe’s soul for her
life, and I wonder if I’ve permanently broken his compass.

I still can’t believe I saw Raven and War on consecutive
days. What are the freaking chances of that happening? Is the universe just
sticking its finger in my life and swirling everything around for a laugh?

Balboa Park offers sprawling fields of green grass and stoic
trees. Auras churn at the edge of my consciousness as families make their way
to the nearby San Diego Zoo or to the main square of Balboa where a handful of gorgeous
museums compete for attention. Across the shady field, two homeless men lay
sprawled out, sleeping on the grass a hundred feet from one another. One is an
old white man with a lined, leathery face and a short beard. He wears a puffy
red and blue jacket, though the weather is mild and inviting. The other is a
short, bald, black man in dirty sweat pants. He twitches and mutters with his
dreams, and I wonder what demons he’s fighting. Just down the hill, six tanned kids
who look like they could be college students throw around a Frisbee. It’s good
to see that people still do that -- come outside just to play. The Frisbee game
is made up of five athletic guys and one slim-legged girl with short blonde
hair who giggles and grounds every Frisbee she throws. She’s so terrible at
Frisbee that she must be one of the guy’s girlfriends, though I can’t tell
which, because three of the men are throwing shades of lust her way in their
auras.

Speaking of lust, my stomach tightens. I feel Rain’s aura
prickle at the edge of my consciousness. That other part of me reaches,
latching onto the feel of his energy. I don’t turn my head. Don’t try to find
him. I just let his energy come closer. The feeling in my stomach isn’t
butterflies. It’s more like centipedes or something with a thousand thready
legs all brushing the lining of my stomach.

Now I hear his clumpy steps through the grass, the way he
plants the crutches and swings forward. He’s coming up from behind me. The wind
brings me his scent -- his toothpaste, his cologne, that more earthy man smell that
is the real him. Lots of cologne. He must be nervous. Like me. I wonder how
many centipedes he has crawling around in his stomach. I will be able to tell
the moment I turn around and see the colors streaking through his aura. I think
I’ve actually forgotten how to breathe.

“Buffy,” he says, and even that one word feels the way I
remember hot syrup used to taste.

Before I turn my head, I can’t help but do a quick mental
sketch of myself right at this moment. I tried to dress casual, but not too
casual. Just a simple t-shirt and jeans. But I chose the royal blue t-shirt with
the V-neck that sinks just enough to hint at cleavage. I’m also wearing my one
fancy bra, the one with too much padding. I probably used too much eyeliner,
but it will make my stormy blue eyes look huge and distract from my round nose.

Stop thinking. Say something.
I turn toward him.

“Hi,” I say. All the dead romantic poets of the ages groan in
their graves.

“Can I sit?” Rain asks.

It is so epically clear that he also tried way too hard to
look like he didn’t try hard. I can see it in the careful spikes of his hair
that are supposed to look like he just ruffled it in the morning. When I look
him over, I get caught up on his sleepy brown eyes, where his heart lives. And
his mouth. Yep, kind of stuck on that too, those soft pink lips guarded by
rough stubble. I’ve mentioned to him before how much I like his rough, bad-boy
stubble, and I know he squirreled it away in his memory.

“Yup,” I say and do this awkward sweep with my hand,
forgetting about my injury and biting back a hiss of pain.  

Rain lets his crutches down and slowly attempts to sit while
sticking his cast out. I’m guessing he’s not so much trying to sit as trying to
get to the ground without falling. Flickers of burnt orange light up in his
aura. I know how to read that color on him. I’ve seen it when he’s knocked over
the salt at our table and when he closed his coat in the car door and I had to
gently point it out. I can practically hear the sigh from his brain,
I wish
I were cool.

Somehow that waver of orange is what I need.

“I had no right to tell you what you could or couldn’t do,”
I say. “This is a big battle, and we don’t have enough soldiers as it is. I was
afraid for you, because…I…I…”

In the car while I was practicing my speech, I imagined
looking him in the eye. Being strong and calm and amazingly tender. Now my
tongue feels as bloated as a beached whale.

“…Because I care about you,” I manage. “But that was
selfish. The ultimatum I gave you was wrong. I just have to live in the moment,
stop wondering about tomorrow or the day after or…”

“Maya, it’s okay.” Rain has put himself on the ground with
only kind of a fall. His left leg is stretched out, and he leans back on his
hands. We could be our own angel-hunting DL together. “You were right. I’m not
very good in the field. It was only a matter of time before I fell off of
something.”

“I’m going to help train you,” I vow. Damn. My speech is all
off now. That was supposed to come toward the end.

Rain shakes his head, throwing a wave of cologne at me. He definitely
used too much. It’s adorable.

“I’m not going back out in the field.”

“Oh!” The way I say it, with such a clear whoosh of relief
betrays all my memorized words. And I’m grinning, this stupid, loopy grin,
because he’s getting out of the biz. That means he’s safe. That means he’ll
leave me more stupid little song refrains he made up on my voicemail.

Rain scoots closer to me. I like his cologne and the smell
of him underneath it. “The news isn’t talking about what happened in Scottsdale
anymore. Have you noticed that? Yesterday it was all over the TV and web, but
today they’re calling it a gang fight and burying it. The coroner says that the
body of the perpetrator they picked up was spiked with flakka. That’s how
they’re explaining it.”

I nod. I’ve been following the story all day on the radio,
or at least trying to follow it. Hard when no one is talking about it anymore.
“There are still some high up angels. They squelched it,” I say. “They can do
that.”

“No, that’s the thing. They can’t.” Rain grins. “That video
is on the web now.” Excitement pulses in his aura. “Maya, I’m not the only one
who’s caught a glimpse of angels, you know. Seen something I can’t quite
explain, lost a family member and watched it covered up. This entire country is
filled with people who suspect something. Angry people. People who want to
fight back.”

I don’t like where this is going. Especially not the intense
shades of blue glowing in Rain’s aura like a new purpose. Rain lowers his voice
even though there is no one around us. He’s used so much gel on his hair that
it doesn’t move at all when he leans in close.

“I’ve created a forum,” he admits.

“What!” I squawk. Shit. This is Tarren’s worst nightmare.
The Totem going around blabbing the big “hey, guess what, genetically altered
things who call themselves angels are secretly killing people and planning to
turn the human race into livestock” secret.

Rain looks at me with eyes that practically shine with
purpose. “I have to. These people are searching. They’re already bumping into
each other online. Sharing their experiences. They need a place to learn the
truth. A place that will let them channel their anger.”

I open my mouth again, but Rain holds up his hands. “The
forum is protected. I put up a welcome page that lists a few commonalities
about angels. A person has to submit their story before I let them in, so I
know if they’ve had a legit experience. Everything is completely anonymous, so
far.”

I actually groan. “So far?”

Now Rain finally drops his gaze. I watch him pluck a long
blade of grass at his knee. “We’ve had some requests,” he says.

About a million more centipedes drop into my stomach. “About
what?”

“About helping the mission. People want to do something,
Maya.”

“Rain, you can’t…”

“When we were searching for Sunshine, when I saw you…”
Rain’s voice wavers the way it always does when he talks about his murdered
sister. “I couldn’t let it go. I looked everywhere for answers and found nothing.
I spent every waking hour either trying to find clues or convinced I was crazy.
When Harold Krugal and his granddaughter Amber went missing, I thought there
might be a connection, especially when the people around him started
disappearing too. I drove all the way out to Poughkeepsie to warn Graham
Hendricks that someone was trying to kill him.”

I’m feeling it again, that huge ball of dread pressing up
against my ribs. The first time Rain told me this story, I’d nodded and chewed
the hell out of my lips. It was only the next night, when my brothers and I
were in some flea-bag motel, that I felt the hot tears scrawl down my face. It
was my fault Rain started his mad quest to find out what happened to his
sister, and that road led him straight to Poughkeepsie…straight into a
nightmare.

“They put me in that barn, Maya,” Rain says. “
They
were
the bad guys, but I didn’t know anything.” He stretches the last word out for
emphasis. “Not until I met the Totem.” Rain swallows and switches tactics. This
is how I know he was practicing
his
speech all the way over here. “You
can’t keep this quiet any longer. You know you can’t. This isn’t a little war.
This is big. This is bloody, and people are dying.”

“I know,” I murmur. I gaze over to the Frisbee game. The
girl has retired from the field. She lies under a shady tree, her head in the
lap of one of the sweaty guys. One of her long, smooth legs sits on top of the
other, and I watch her ankle rotate as the guy bends down to kiss her. I will
never, ever be that girl.

“I’ve been talking about it with Bear,” Rain continues. The
strand of grass in his hands has three small knots, and he winds it around his
finger again. “We’re thinking of building a network of localized monitors,
people who look out for strange deaths or even scatter a few thermal cameras in
crowded places and watch for angels. And…” He pauses here, but I already see
the drift of his conversation. Network. He said the word network. That means
dozens, maybe hundreds of people who all know the secret. Who could blow this
thing wide open.

“We’ve talked about building Totem squads.”

“Squads,” I echo, and my voice is flat.

“Each unit has a territory. We train them. Equip them. When
a monitor in their territory finds an angel, we send the squad in to take it
out.”

I blurt out the first thought that propels to the center of
my mind. “People are going to die.”

“People have already died.” Rain’s voice is rising. “We were
sloppy when we first started. I know that. The knowledge you and Gabe shared
was priceless. It would have taken us years to learn everything you already
knew. If we don’t help these people, at least give them some training and
cohesion, they’re going to go out on their own anyway. And then they’ll
definitely die.”

“But could you handle it?” I challenge him. My voice is
hard, angry, but all I feel in my gut is swirling fear. “Could you handle
watching one of your trainees die?”

“I’ll have to.”

It hits me then. Rain isn’t asking my permission. He’s going
to do this. Our world is shifting in a way that cannot be undone. Tarren will
go bonkers over this.  

Rain waits for me to say something, but all I can think is,
it’s
all falling apart.
My brothers have spent their entire lives fighting a small,
silent war against a well-hidden enemy. There were unsaid rules. The angel
population was tiny. But then Grand discovered he could create endless angels
using bone marrow injections. As soon as the word got out, the angel population
exploded. The angels aren’t hiding as well anymore. They aren’t a cohesive,
rule-driven unit. My brothers and I have been exhausting ourselves, chasing,
chasing, chasing the tail of this ever-growing monster. We’ve gotten tired and
sloppy. I am gripped every night when I close my eyes by the certainty one of
us will die very soon.

I lift up my eyes. Rain has started knotting a second blade
of grass. His aura is jumpy with nerves. What an amazing boy. My brothers and I
have been fighting a new war the old way, refusing to acknowledge that things
have changed. But Rain has seen the truth. He has adapted, and for the first
time I feel the slightest ray of hope about the future.

If War is building an army of angels, then perhaps we need
to build an army of humans to fight them. It will mean changing the way we do
things. It will mean caring about new people and losing some of those people.
But we have to take this leap, or we’ll be trampled.

“It’s a good idea,” I say.

“It is?” he asks, genuinely shocked. “I thought you’d hate
it.”

“I do. And so will Gabe and Tarren, but we don’t have a
choice anymore. We need more watchers, more fighters. And we can’t keep this
quiet. Your idea is…is…brilliant.”