Rising (24 page)

“But you stayed.” I step up next to Rain
and clench the bloody dagger in my hand. We need to end this soon. Even the
distant neighbors were bound to hear all those gunshots. We’ve got three bodies
to load before the first responders get here. And Rain’s fucking hat to find.

“I…Rachel. She shouldn’t have been with
him.”

“Who?” Rain asks.

The angel stares at his aura. He digs an
elbow into the ground and drags himself forward even as Rain takes another step
back to maintain the distance.

“War,” the angel says and either laughs
or sobs. “I had money too. I would have bought her things. Beautiful things. Taken
care of her….Treated her with…with dignity.” He drags himself a little closer. “She
deserved dignity.”

“We need to go,” I say. Rain looks over
at me. His eyes travel to my dagger.

“I’ll do it,” he says. His aura is a
fireworks show. No wonder our dying angel is giving up all his intel. Who can
concentrate with all those hues vibrating into a song so loud and tempting? I
force myself to look through the colors to the terrified boy beneath. His face
is pale and rigid, and his throat flexes like he’s trying to keep down vomit.

I was like that once, so afraid and so determined
to get my hands bloody at the same time. I stare at the sticky mess on my
palms.
Those bloody bubbles dripping off that girl’s chin will be in my
memories forever.

“You have to walk away from this,” I
tell him softly.

Anger flickers in Rain’s aura, and I
know I have said the wrong words. His mouth sets in a stubborn line. “And go
back to what? Bagging groceries?”

“You don’t want this.”
I don’t want
this for you.
“You’ll get killed.”

“Yeah, probably.” A note of uncertainty
enters his voice.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley
of…of the shadow of death…,” the red-headed angel whispers.

“I couldn’t save Sunshine,” Rain says.

“Her killer is dead,” I tell him.

“…I will fear no evil…”

“He could kill someone else’s sister.” Rain
chokes on the words.

“…for thou…thou….” The angel reaches out
to Rain, his bloody fingers inches from Rain’s shoes.

Rain lines up his shot. Quivering gun.

The angel stares up into the barrel of
the gun. “FOR THOU ART WITH ME!”

Rain’s shot finds that mop of orange
hair and turns it red. The prayer cuts off, and the angel sags in the snow. There
is no silence. Rain’s breath is ragged, and his aura bucks up and down, keeping
the symphony of hunger loud in my ears.

“I’m gonna puke,” he says but continues
standing, swaying, as tears scrawl down his face. I ache to reach out to him,
to share his pain with the simple, beautiful, human consolation of touch.
Instead, I take a step back, balling my hands tight to keep a reign on my
concentration. His throbbing aura wears down my control like sandpaper.

“I’ll bring the jeep around so we can
load the bodies,” I tell him. “Go find your hat.”

It turns out that Rain is just about as
good at digging graves as climbing trees. Maybe it’s just the general
incompetence he seems to bring to every endeavor, but I suspect that shock is
also a factor.

My chosen gravesite is an anonymous
patch of woodland in Pekin Lake, a large wildlife conservation area just south
of Peoria. After leaving the highway, we passed a few mom & pop bait and
tackle shops, the indomitable golden arches of McDonalds, and not much else.

I’ve never picked a burial ground on my
own before, but Pekin Lake is big, quiet, and empty – the perfect trifecta when
needing to get corpses into the ground quickly. I can’t help but wonder if
Tarren would have chosen this place or found problems that I’ve overlooked. Every
little sound has me gripping the handle of my shovel so hard that I’m likely to
snap it in half.

And then there’s Rain.

He pushes his shovel into the snow and
struggles to get it out.

“Push it in at an angle,” I tell him.

“Angels?” His head whips around, and he clasps
the shovel to his body like a weapon.

“Angle. Your shovel.” I demonstrate by
plunging mine into the ground. “The top foot or so will be frozen, so just go
in shallow.” I dump the icy dirt onto my growing pile.

“Okay.”

This curt, business-only dialogue has
been the way of it since we slung the three bodies into the back of the jeep
and made it out just as two police cruisers sped by, sirens screaming. I study Rain,
his red-tipped, running nose, his faraway eyes, and his aura churning with so
many different colors. I wish I could read him better.

We dig.

Rain tires quickly; stitches of red
deepen in his aura, but we keep going. I try to dig fast, scooping up big shovelfuls
once we get past the first frozen layer, so he won’t have to do as much work.

I’m not sure what to say to him. There
are no Hallmark cards after you’ve shot a begging, wounded man at point blank
range. We’re both sticky with blood and barbed memories. At least his memories will
fade with time. Mine never do.

The silence is too much.

“It doesn’t get easier,” I tell him as I
pull up another thick shovelful of black dirt. “Just more routine.”

“This was routine for you?” he asks
dully.

“We try to operate cleaner than this,
but sometimes…” I remember the stories Gabe has told me about drowning an angel
in his own pool or how they sometimes break into houses and slit throats so as
not to wake the neighbors with gunshots. “Sometimes it has to be messy.”

I glance at him to see if my words are
having any effect. His bare hands must be freezing, but he doesn’t say anything
about them.

“It will hollow you out.”

“It hasn’t hollowed you out,” he says
right back, and those brown eyes challenge me.

“How would you know?”

“Because you could have killed us, down
in the basement when we captured you. You could have killed us, but you
didn’t.” Rain pauses to wipe his runny nose on his sleeve. “Because you care
enough that you don’t want me to be a part of this for my own good. Because,
well, because when you laughed at me before, it sounded real.”

I could laugh now. Or cry. The fact that
he considers me functional is hardly a ringing endorsement of his perceptive
skills.

“My brothers keep me sane,” I confide to
him.
Well, mostly Gabe and not by much.

I am acutely aware of the fact that I
shouldn’t have brought Rain along for body burying. Tarren would’ve never
allowed such an unnecessary risk. As soon as we get back, Rain might very well
march into the first bar he finds, get shitfaced, and blurt out everything.
Tarren’s injuries will keep us here for days. If Rains opens his mouth, if any
of his team talks, then we’re all royally screwed.

But I did drag Rain out here, and it obviously
has nothing to do with his unimpressive digging skills. I give him another once
over from the corner of my eye, noting the frown of concentration on his face
and his tall, well-limbed body.

Rain Bailey, world’s worst angel hunter,
won’t survive long in his new profession. That means I have to save him, and
I’m going to do it by showing him the absolute misery of this life. It’s not
just the violence and gore, it’s also this right here – these long, cold digs that
blister hands and cramp up the lower back. It’s the disappointing numbness when
the tarp-wrapped bodies disappear beneath a shower of dirt. The wheel of
violence, death, and danger that never stops turning.

An unbidden thought intrudes.
Why do
I care so much about saving Rain Bailey?
After all, I’ve hardly given any
thought to Milo, Bear Mask, or the young girl behind the yellow bird mask.

My brain needs to mind its own fucking
business. There’s nothing between me and Rain. There can
never be
anything
between us. So what if I want to feel his lips on mine again? I also want to absorb
every last drop of his velvet aura. There hasn’t been a more doomed
relationship since King Kong took Ann Darrow to the top of the Empire State
Building on their first date.

And Ryan.
I try to pull up the memory of his face.
Why is it so hard? I can remember pieces – his dark eyes, jet black hair, the
way he would tuck my body into his at night. But when I try to put them
together it doesn’t seem to fit. My boyfriend has been dead for less than a
year, and I’m already starting to pant after another.
What the hell is wrong
with me?

“You have a weird expression on your
face,” Rain says. “I’d ask you if you were alright, but, well…” He motions at
the grave opening up in front of us.

“I was just arguing with myself,” I say and
bring up another large shovelful of dirt.

Rain is quiet for a moment as he pulls
up his shovel and lets its contents fall into the small pile behind him. “Who
won?” he asks.

I scramble for a clever answer, but
nothing comes up. “I don’t know.”

When the grave is almost finished, I
jump into the hole and carve out the sides to make it wider. Rain takes the
bodies from the back of the jeep one at a time and lays them by the edge of the
grave.

I hear the soft
whump
as each
body lands next to the grave. One, two, three. Then Rain’s voice above.

“What if we get caught?” he asks.

“I’d hear anyone coming long before they
got here.”

“Really? Your hearing is that good?”

“It’s pretty good.”

“What else?”

“What else, what?”

“What else is pretty good?”

I look up and see his face floating over
the edge of the grave above me. He doesn’t mean it the way Tarren does. He’s
not trying to study me and break me down for his analysis and reports. But
still…the last thing I want to talk about is what a freak I am.

“It’s fine now,” I say and heft my
shovel out of the hole before scrambling out. Rain lets his question go, but his
eyes swing between our two piles of dirt, mine twice as high as his and then
some.

The swaddled bodies look more like thick
blue logs than people. Good thing I packed extra tarp for the mission. I roll them
into the grave, and they thud one on top of the other. The tallest log is James
Turner, the red-headed angel. I have his wallet in the jeep. His 24
^th
birthday would have been next week. The two women didn’t have ID, so I don’t
even know their names or why the girl with the glowing eyes decided to attack
us. Maybe Gabe and his “Gabettes” killed someone close to her too. The heart
tattoo on the wrist of the last attacker – the girl with a boy’s haircut – matched
the heart tattoo on the neck of one of the teens killed at that mansion. She’d
been the fan of
SpongeBob SquarePants
reruns. I wonder about their
relationship – sisters, best friends, lovers? I’ll never know.

When I see the blue logs settled at the
bottom of the grave, I worry that the hole isn’t deep enough, but I start
pushing on the dirt anyway. Rain watches me, watches the shower of dirt hide
the lives we’ve taken, and then he joins in. When all the dirt is packed in, I
throw on some snow for good measure. We’ve made a big muddy mess, but hopefully
the falling flakes will hide it by morning, which shouldn’t be too far off now.

“That’s it?” Rain asks, his voice soft
and sad.

“No.”

I close my eyes and prepare to say the
words I’ve made up to make myself feel a little better each time we put a new
body in the ground. My brothers always tolerate this little routine of mine,
loading up the car while I do it.

Rain hesitates, then steps next to me.
Too close, but he doesn’t know any better yet.

I say the words out loud for him.
“
You
embraced the change and chose to feed off the lives of innocents. Your death
was merited, and I do not regret it. But I know how loudly the hunger calls. I
know we all have some measure of darkness in our hearts. May you be at peace.”

“Rest in peace,” Rain says. His voice is
solemn, and if the song weren’t so loud in my mind, I might have melted just a
little. I quickly step away from him and gather the shovels.

The I-29 is nearly abandoned on the way
back to Peoria. It’s a long, dark, silent drive. Dark except for Rain’s aura churning
through its many different colors. I tighten my grip on the wheel. When I see
him tucking his hands between his legs, I put the heat on full blast. He holds
his hands out in front of the vents and slowly bends his fingers. Torn blisters
decorate his palms, and he hisses as the air hits them. Snow beads in his hair.

We exit off the highway.

“I’m human,” I blurt out.

“Huh?” Rain blinks, obviously returning
from deep within his own thoughts.

“Question number two on your list. I’m
not an extraterrestrial.”

“I was pretty sure you weren’t,” he
says. “We just wanted to cover all the bases.”

I suddenly want to explain it to him,
need to explain that I’m still mostly human, just different. Tarren has a
cumbersome sciency way of describing the change and what it means to be an
angel. He uses sleep-inducing terms like “genetic restructuring”, “maximized
energy absorption”, and “hyper-kinetic awareness.” Gabe’s explanation is better,
if less precise, and so I use his version.

“It’s kind of like Captain America,” I
tell Rain. “My DNA got scrambled, and now I’m stronger and faster, with a
couple of other upgrades as well.”

Rain is quiet for a long time, and I
wonder if it’s all too much. I study his aura, but if he’s cracking up, I can’t
see it within his energy field.

“So, you’re Captain America,” he says
finally.

“No.” It’s time to address the elephant
in the car. “I feed off the energy of living things. I’m pretty sure Captain
America doesn’t do that.”

“No, I think he just kind of throws his
shield around and hits people in the face with it,” Rain admits.

I pull in behind Bear’s truck. Rain
turns to me. The shadows paint his eyes black. “You said before, that you
weren’t a…,” he struggles with the word. “…an angel by choice. Is that true?”

I gaze down at my gloved hands. “I would
have never chosen this, but it doesn’t change what I am.” I look at Rain, lock
his eyes to make sure I have his attention, “or the danger I present.”

He needs to understand this…just in
case.

Rain swallows, then reaches into the back
to retrieve his backpack. I flinch away from the whirl of his aura, and I don’t
think he notices. We look at each other.

“Should I, uh, burn these clothes?” he
asks.

“You can if you want, but the blood usually
comes out with stain remover,” I tell him. We keep staring at each other.
“Sometimes it takes two cycles though,” I add.

He looks thoughtful. “Will the police
come?”

“Probably not. Unless they find the
bodies,” I tell him. “If you think the police are onto you, then burn
everything. Get rid of all your weapons. Dump your identity. Gabe can tell you
how to build back up.” Saying it out loud, I realize how crazy it all sounds.
Good.
The crazier, the better.

Rain shakes his head, and a short,
hoarse laugh erupts from his lips.

“Welcome to the biz,” I say lamely,
which is the last thing I should say, because I want him out of the biz. I want
him so far out of the biz that I would lock him in the International Space
Station if I could. His eyes flick up to meet mine, and I suck in a breath,
because in the midst of that rainbow aura I see threads of deep violet glow and
fade.

Lust,
I think stupidly.

Rain looks away and opens the door
bringing in a blast of icy air and swirling snowflakes. I should say something
now. Something comforting or thought provoking or, I don’t know, majestic. But
there’s nothing in my head. Nothing but music, which I can’t tell him about.

He closes the door and stands there looking
at me. Should I wave?