by J Bennett
A while later, my eyes spot an unnatural shade of blue among the leaves, and I find a snag of clothing on a sharp point in the bark. I’m seventy feet off the ground, standing on a thick branch that none but the most dexterous or pick-axe-wielding humans could climb.
I loosen the fabric and rub the soft fleece between my fingers. The swatch is too small to guess at its origins. A jacket? I close my eyes and inhale the fabric’s scent. The angel. I’m deep in the woods now, not near any paths, not anywhere even the most rugged woodsman would wander. Why would the angel come this far away from its quarry? I sit down on the branch and take in the world around me. My eyes find lush tree tops and foggy mountain silhouettes in the distance. Lake Sammamish to my right, dark and placid. The wind thoughtfully explores my face, touching soft lips to my cheeks.
I think I understand. The angel came here to be alone. As alone as the hunger will allow. Maybe not a complete monster after all. Maybe something in between. Like me.
I hear Gabe’s voice calling. I hadn’t realized how far I’d gone, and I quickly make my way back. He calls out my name again, and I am unexpectedly stirred by the notes of worry in his voice. Without thinking, I leap from the tree to land in front of him.
Gabe whips out his gun. His aura flares up, all spiky, dark and violent. The expression on his face is intent and murderous.
Chapter 35
“Gabe?” I whimper.
“Jesus!” he blinks and lowers his gun. His brows come together, and he grimaces, as if in pain.
“I’m sorry,” I say, feeling the blood come rushing into my cheeks, “You sounded worried.”
“Just…don’t do that again. Ever.” Gabe tucks the gun back into his waistband, and his eyebrows come away. He softens his voice. “I didn’t know where you were.”
I assess his aura, looking for his true emotions, but, as always, they follow his face. The color is calming down to his natural blue, and the spikes recede to a steadier flow.
“I wasn’t able to pick up on a trail, but Tarren called from the morgue. We’ve got radiation on concert guy,” Gabe says. He hands me back my hat.
“Radiation is confirmation,” I say and am relieved to see him smile. “I found something too.” I pull the fabric swatch from my pocket.
* * *
We pick up Tarren from the hospital. I watch in the rearview mirror as he flips open his briefcase and tucks his glasses into the side pocket. Next goes the medical tech badge.
“How’d it go Dr. McDreamy?” Gabe asks.
“Radiation on the body,” Tarren replies. He shrugs off his blazer. “Angel.”
“Stakeout?” Gabe’s eyes flick to the mirror.
Tarren nods. Both their energies rise, Tarren’s all pointy and nervous, Gabe’s a general swelling with little ripples all along the edges. I don’t know what this means yet, what complex emotion they are unconsciously sharing with each other.
“My turn,” Gabe sighs.
* * *
Tarren follows us to our beige room. I give the rabbits a longing glance. I’m beginning to twitch again, and I wrap my arms around my body, pressing my hands hard against my ribs.
Tarren unzips a side compartment of my duffle bag. “We leave in half an hour,” he says to Gabe who nods and collapses backward on his bed. I expect him to argue against my participation but he doesn’t. Good, because there’s no way in hell I’m sitting out another mission even though I’m getting queasy and itchy in weird places all over my body.
“Take this.” Tarren hands me a rough stone block. “And this.” A little black bottle with no label drops into my hand.
“This is that thing the pedicure people use,” I say rubbing my fingers across the stone.
“Pumice.” Tarren looks like he’s frowning even when he’s not. Maybe it’s the expectation of his displeasure, or maybe he’s somehow perfected a way to frown only with his voice. “Go in the shower. Let the water run over your body then scrub with the stone.”
“But —”
“Everywhere. Push hard —”
“They use this on people’s feet, you can’t —”
“Go over everything twice. Then turn the water off and rub the lotion on your entire body. Hair too. Don’t miss anywhere —”
“What is it? Come on this is we--”
“Wait two minutes then rinse off. There’s an outfit in there for you. Black.”
I hear a sound from the bed, but when I turn Gabe’s got his eyes closed. It sounded like a snort.
“What kind of outfit?” I ask, suspicion mounting.
“We didn’t have a lot of time —” Tarren begins, but I’m already pawing through the bag.
“These are pajamas!” I accuse, pulling out black stretch pants. “You want me to wear pajamas on a stakeout?”
Gabe is sitting up on the bed, his eyes twinkling in an extremely unsettling way. “Not just any pajamas…”
I unfold the shirt and cry out in horror. A smiling teddy bear sits on the front holding a pink heart between its paws. Its beady black eyes mock.
“No. No way.”
“It was the only black outfit in your size,” Tarren tells me.
“What about the boys’ section? Did you check the boys’ section?”
“Oh.”
“This isn’t funny!” I scream at Gabe who is snickering behind me. I huff to the bathroom and slam the door.
“Half hour,” Tarren calls after me.
“Man, she is pissed,” I hear Gabe say to his brother just before I turn the water hot and begin to scrub.
The pumice eats away at my skin, but I don’t mind. I push harder, leaving angry red rashes across my breasts and stomach. The pain helps distract me from the hunger, but the scrubbing also seems to be wearing away my barriers, allowing carefully guarded emotions to seep through. Fear escapes first.
Suddenly. Utterly.
Fear of anything and everything, but mostly because I’m so damn tired. Why do I still lose my breath at random moments in the night, paralyzed with the conviction that this can’t possibly be real? Why is it so quickly followed with the equally certain conviction that I’m a monster, that I’m losing control, that it’s only a matter of time before I give in wholly to the song?
The lotion burns and reeks of alcohol. I grit my teeth as I wipe down my raw skin with the gooey mess. I didn’t realize that two minutes could possibly take this long; that seconds could endeavor to stretch themselves so far before breaking.
When I come out, Gabe is sitting at the desk reviewing maps of Marymoor Park on his laptop.
“Hurts like a bitch right? That’s the best thing about being bait. I get to stink.” Gabe leans back in his chair and looks me over. “Man, that outfit.” He shakes his head. “Sorry about that. I told Tarren…” his voice trails off as he looks up and sees the expression on my face.
The bear on my chest pants angrily. It’s everything about this day and the hunger still here, growing loud.
“Maya, don’t go with us tonight,” Gabe says, but I’m not about to let him get started on that refrain again. I walk over to the rabbit cage and pull open the door.
“Not the gray one,” Gabe’s voice is soft.
“You shouldn’t get attached,” I say, coating frost over my words and sounding more like Tarren then I meant to. The gray rabbit stands apart from its huddled companions and stares at me with bright black eyes that seem strangely aware. Its nose trembles. I reach around and pull out one of the remaining white bunnies.
I can’t get my glove off fast enough. The explosion of energy when my palm connects to the animal’s energy field is riveting. I slump against the bed, eyes closed, forcing my breathing to slow. I drop the limp body on the floor.
Gabe turns his face away, but I catch the flicker of disgust.
“I’ve been meaning to ask…” I pull my glove back on, wriggling my fingers through the holes. The words don’t come. The only questions left are the dangerous ones. The ones that might be lions in disguise.<
br />
“About what?” Gabe picks at the holes in the knees of his jeans.
“About how you found me. Why you came back after all those years.”
Gabe flinches like I’ve pressed against an open sore, and now I know I’ve made a mistake.
“Grand found out about you.”
“How?”
“Grand has his ways. Tarren and I, we never meant for this to happen, for you to be dragged into all this.”
“You’ve said that already.”
“I just want you to know that.” Gabe is studying his knees intensely. “We never tried to find you. It was safer that way. You were supposed to be happy. Be normal.”
“I believe you.”
“I’m not asking for forgiveness; I won’t ever ask for that.” This is my brother Gabe, in his scruffy jeans, dirty tennis shoes, laces tangled with knots, and that sad sad look digging deeper into his face.
“Just tell me the rest.”
“Grand got sloppy. Showed up on our radar in Nashville, though we didn’t know it was him at the time. We almost caught up to him too, but he slipped away just before we got to this huge condo he was staying in. He left a laptop behind. Everything was encrypted of course, and not that pansy off-the-shelf crap. This was big time. Took me a couple days, but I cracked it.” Gabe gives himself a congratulatory smile.
“We learned that he was looking for you — had hired the best trackers, given them every resource available. They were close. It was only a matter of time, Maya. We had to find you first. We had to protect you.”
“Why does Grand even care about me?”
“His family takes blood very seriously.”
“Like you.”
“That’s different. Blood’s all we got. All we get.” Gabe clears his throat, brushes the hair out of his eyes. “Mom did a good job of hiding you. She never told us where, well, never even told us about you until just before she died.”
“So how then?”
“Me being a genius, of course.” A smile flickers on Gabe’s face but doesn’t get far. “And Tarren, a little. He was six years old when you were born. Mom must have thought he would forget if she never spoke of you, but he didn’t. He remembered that Mom took us for a long ride a little while after you were born. You were crying and stinking and generally annoying him even from your earliest days. Finally, she stopped at some motel and put us all to bed. The next morning, you were gone.”
“What did she tell him?” This feels so hollow, like we’re talking about someone else. This isn’t my life, my mother driving me to exile with such conviction.
“He doesn’t remember,” Gabe replies, “just that you were gone. Which, for our purposes, meant that you could be anywhere. That’s when me and my genius brain got involved.”
I take a long breath and try to concentrate. Outside, the light is fading away, leaving a damp, uninterested gray to embrace the coming night. Rain patters light fingers on the roof of the motel, and I envision just this very same grizzled and lifeless day when my mother kissed me for the last time and left me in the cold.
Gabe is still speaking, “…From there, all I had to do was find a needle in a pile of needles. I downloaded records from every orphanage in the country for the years we thought you might have been born, and I put together this huge list of names and social security numbers. Mom didn’t leave any clues. We had nothing, until….”
“What?” my voice is all breathy, more air then sound.
“Tarren remembered that you had a birthmark on your back somewhere, which was better than nothing, but honestly, not much….”
And then I don’t hear him anymore.
I’m in a vacant storage unit, shivering, weeping, as a naked bulb swings its too-bright spotlight over me. The stranger trails his fingers down my shoulder. Searching for something.
I push the memory back, way back, chain it to the farthest corner of my mind, spin a whole roll of duct tape around its mouth, pull a hood over its face and slap it around a little just for good measure. When I come back up for air, the room seems to be tilting, and all the sounds and smells and hungers that I have been keeping at bay all rush back into my consciousness. I have to sit down on the bed and plunge my hot hands deep into the comforter. I shiver.
“...put together some wicked searches. Name by name. Mostly for images, filtering out all the girls on my list who didn’t fit, looking for that birthmark,” Gabe continues. “It was brutal. I don’t think I slept for a week, honestly. We were in the crappiest motel on the planet. The air conditioning was broken or something, and it was like 100 degrees outside. I was sweating buckets, staring at pictures until my eyes were crossing, but I kept going ‘cause I knew Grand was getting closer and closer to you. And then one day I got to your name on the list.”
Damn him, I can actually see happy lilac streaks pulsing through Gabe’s aura. As for me, another shiver sweeps through my body, rattling my bones. These daggers in my lungs feel so real.
“Your high school newspaper archives all of its issues online. Two years ago, March, in the sports section there was this picture of a girl winning a race at a track meet.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“No,” Gabe smiles, “but there were three girls cheering her on as she crossed the finish line. All wearing tank tops. The girl in the middle had a birthmark on her shoulder. You could barely see it, but it was there. I still have that picture. From there I hacked your Facebook page, and there you were. Right in front of me.” Gabe laughs a small laugh. He’s still trying to find my eyes, spread his smile to me, but I can’t lift up my head.
“I knew right away. You look like Mom. And it was so…so amazing to see you there. All these pictures of this person I’d been imaging. There’s this one,” he laughs again. Purple blushes all around him. “…where you’re playing Guitar Hero, and you’re, like, totally into it. You’re biting your lip, and you have this look in your eyes like nothing is going to stop you, not ever. Mom got that look too. All the time. There were all these postings from your friends and that guy Ryan. Lots of weird literature stuff and inside jokes. Some stuff in Latin, I think…”
“Okay,” I bark, because he’s hurting me and doesn’t know it; tearing open the boxes I’ve packed so carefully, throwing my vulnerable, tender memories all over the floor.
“You had a life. You had friends. It was, like you were…”
“Normal?”
“Happy. Or at least not unhappy. We went straight to Connecticut from Tennessee to figure out the situation. Tarren grabbed a cup you threw away and sent it off to Lo. He confirmed that you were you, our sister.”
Half sister. Half everything.
“The day we found out was the day Grand took you. We were trying to figure out what to do, how to keep you safe, you know, without completely ruining your life.” Gabe’s voice grows softer. “We should have seen him coming, but there were no unusual deaths, no angel activity. He just…just stole you away. If Tarren hadn’t insisted on sneaking a tracker into your purse, we never would have found you again. Occasionally his paranoia does pay off.”
I open my mouth. “Grand didn’t know,” my voice cracks. The air is so hard to pull in.
“Huh?” Gabe says.
I need to breathe; need to get to a window or a toilet. A knock on the door, and Tarren’s energy jumping behind it. Gabe’s face is growing suspicious. Lines creasing along his mouth.
“Grand didn’t know you were coming,” I say quickly. “You saved my life.”
“We should have done more.” Gabe stands up, but I beat him to the door.
“You did enough.” I turn the knob and let Tarren in.
Chapter 36
Tarren’s face is flushed, and he’s freshly shaven. I can hardly catch his scent even when I’m only five feet away. Now I understand the pumice stone and the alcohol lotion. He wears a snug black jacket and black pants. Gabe is still in his torn jeans and wrinkled shirt. He hasn’t showered or shaved.
Without a
word, we make our way out of the motel. Tarren looks every inch the professional spy. I exude mentally handicapped charity case and Gabe just comes off as homeless. I learn on the drive over that this is exactly the point.
The boys munch on protein bars, and Gabe sucks down two Red Bulls before we make it back to Marymoor Park. Rain patters against the windows of the SUV, and I shiver. The clouds are losing their glow, and in the encroaching dusk I see the sweep of flashlights threading through the woods.
“Shit,” Gabe mutters.
“They’re still searching for her,” Tarren confirms.
“We’ve got to get them out of the park. They’re easy pickings for the angel.”
Tarren is silent a moment, thinking. “We can’t,” he decides.
“They’re in danger.”
“We won’t be able to find them all.”
“We could set a fire. A little one. The fire trucks come, shoo the people away.”
“First, it’s raining. Second, the volunteers would come back as soon as the fire was out. Third, the firemen would be just as likely targets.”
“But —” Gabe begins.
“We can’t do anything about them,” Tarren says sternly. “What we can do is present a more tempting target. The volunteers are in pairs and groups. They have flashlights and whistles. Risky for an angel. It will be looking for the most vulnerable prey. The easiest kill.”
The brothers look at each other, energies syncing again. Gabe sighs.