The bench seat was hard and narrow. I flipped around, trying to get comfortable. My body was crying out for rest, my brain too tired to fend off the thoughts that were racing through it: terror for my sister and her friend. Worry about the loyalty we could expect from Raph. Confusion over my own feelings for Michael and whether I would ever be able to trust him again. Over and over, I tried to chase the worries away. Over and over, I struggled to adjust my body to the hard contours of the SUV’s seat.
Finally, frustrated and unable to chase away the chill, I pounded out a pillow and flopped over.
“Can’t sleep?”
I sat up, Michael’s question a convenient excuse to abandon my futile tossing and turning.
“I want to. I need to. But it’s hopeless.”
“I have an idea.”
Leaving the engine running, he left the driver’s seat and came around the opposite side, joining me in the back.
“Slide over.”
I scooted across the bench, making room for him to join me. He pulled the door closed, giving a shiver himself.
“Here,” he began, patting his legs. “Stretch out on my lap.”
I stared at his thighs, his muscles tautly outlined against the worn denim of his jeans, and swallowed hard.
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” I answered vaguely, shrinking back against the seat.
He pursed his lips together. “Don’t be stupid, Carmichael. You need to warm up. And I’m a walking furnace, as you so frequently point out. You’ll sleep in no time at all, I promise.”
I eyed him warily. What he was saying made sense, after all.
“Come on,” he reiterated, grabbing a pillow. “Spread out and let me warm you up.”
The thought came to me: old habits die hard. Pushing it away, I tucked a blanket around my shoulders and stretched out, laying my head in Michael’s lap. A surge of warmth enveloped me and, against my will, I let out a tiny sigh of relief, sinking into his body.
“Better?” Michael prompted, his voice a low growl that combined with the purr of the engine.
“Better,” I confirmed, burrowing into my blankets.
My entire body relaxed, soothed by the heat and familiar scent of hay and honey that emanated from Michael’s body. I didn’t complain when he began stroking my hair, his fingers sending pulses of electricity to surge through my body. I let my eyes drift closed, basking in the comfort of his touch. But I still couldn’t stop worrying enough to sleep.
“Did you find them on Backpage?” I finally asked.
His hand paused on the back of my neck.
“Yes.”
My body tensed, and I started to push myself up, but he stopped me.
“There were so many of them, Hope. Just rows and rows of girls for sale. But I found them. There were pictures of them there, together. I tried to—” He paused, the words getting stuck in his throat. “Place an order,” he said between gritted teeth. “But they’re booked up for a few days. Both of them.”
I pushed away his hands and sat up.
“We have to find them, Michael. We have to.” I looked up at his face, pleading. There were shadows under his eyes, the lines around them deep. With a shock, I realized he was as afraid for them as I was.
I threw myself into his arms, burying my face in his chest, trying to chase away our fear. He kissed the top of my head, pulling me closer. “I wish I could sense them more strongly. But I can’t.”
Guilt now crowded in to join my other warring emotions. The invisible cord that linked me with Michael, the one that let us feel and think almost as one, was jumbled and knotted, the signals choked off by resentment and mistrust. Our unfinished business was impeding us from finding my sister.
I thought of what Enoch had told me earlier. Just ask him, he’d urged. Just ask him what had been so important that he’d stayed with Gabrielle the night my family was attacked. I sighed, pushing down the panic that surged from the depths at the thought of having Michael confirm what I’d already assumed was his betrayal.
“Michael,” I began cautiously, keeping my eyes pressed tightly closed, listening to the steady beat of his heart.
He didn’t answer me immediately. His hand had snuck under my shirt, his fingers absentmindedly trailing against my spine. It felt so natural, so right.
“I’m so afraid of failing you, Hope.”
I started to protest, but the words stuck in my throat. Of course he felt that way. I’d made him feel that way. Over and over again, I’d forced him to prove himself. I focused on his heartbeat and chose my next words carefully.
“What were you really doing with Gabrielle the night Lucas attacked my family?” I asked. “If you knew something was wrong, why didn’t you come?”
He stiffened, his hand suddenly stilled against my bare skin.
“It doesn’t matter,” he answered gruffly.
“It does,” I insisted. “I want to know the truth.”
He cleared his throat. “Hope …” His voice trailed off, uncertain.
“Just tell me,” I urged, steeling myself.
He sighed. “Very well.” There was a long pause. He started stroking my back again. “Yes, there was a group of refugees, as Gabrielle mentioned at the trial. But they were incidental. The only reason we were even there was that Gabrielle and I were looking for Lucas.”
“What?” I flipped over to look him in the face. “What do you mean, you were looking for Lucas?”
He looked down at me in his lap. With a grim smile, he tucked a piece of stray hair behind my ear. “He’d been released from his sentence early. No one knew why, exactly, and very few of us knew about it at all. I only knew because I’d started to sense him again. The feelings were vague and undirected. But I’d grown concerned that he was about to make himself known. We’d followed a lead to Syria, trying to track him down.”
I stared up at him, dumbfounded. “You never told me you knew Lucas had been released.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t want to worry you. And I wanted to believe that Gabrielle would do the right thing, that she wouldn’t let her convictions about angelic superiority get in the way of her duty to me. To you.”
I closed my eyes against the hot, angry tears that welled up.
He let a bitter laugh escape him. “So much for the infallibility and perfection we angels are supposedly blessed with. I can’t seem to get anything right when it comes to you.”
I sat up then. “That’s not true,” I whispered, wrapping my arms tightly around him.
He trailed a finger along my abdomen, feather light across my taut muscles. A yearning for him welled up, deep inside me, so strong that it shocked me. I took a deep breath.
He broke free of my embrace and brought his fingers to my chin, lifting my eyes to meet his. For once, he didn’t bother to mask the centuries of pain he had witnessed as the protector of mankind. And he let me see into the depths of his soul—and how my rejection these past days, I realized with a shock, had wounded him more than anything else he had experienced.
“I love you, Carmichael. I swear to you that I will find your sister. But what happens beyond that is up to you, now.”
He disentangled himself from me and pushed me aside.
I blinked hard, my body crying out from the suddenness of our separation. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to walk the man camps to see if I can sense anything further. To see if anyone recognizes Rorie from her photo. I can’t just sit here.”
“What about me? Let me go with you.”
He shook his head.
“I need to be alone, Carmichael. And I think you do, too.”
He climbed out of the car, closing me in with a resounding slam of the door.
I sat, alone, stunned by the suddenness of his departure. The cold and silence pressed in on me, the longing of my body making me all too aware of the emptiness of my loss.
After a while, there was a tiny ping from my mobile.
It’ll
take me a day, but I’m coming. ND better get itself ready ’cause I’m gonna kick butt and take names.
I chuckled, wiping my runny nose and smiling.
Tabby was coming. I blew out a deep breath. My friend was coming. I could hold on for one more day. I could do that, nurse my broken heart, and more, find my sister.
twenty-two
LUCAS
I watched the girls lying on the mattress. They were puzzles to me, ciphers, confounding me at every turn, surprising me with their responses to the filth into which they had been thrust.
Rorie had been on calls for four days. Her innocence had been sold to the highest bidder: a man who claimed to be religious, from an oil town in Texas. Rorie had found this ironic, I suppose, and had said something to him. He’d told her his daughters never talked back to him that way.
She’d responded, immediately: “Are your daughters my age? Do you think there are creepy old men paying to have sex with your daughters tonight?”
He’d beat her, then, screaming at her to shut up; my bouncer had to break in to the room to protect my investment. We had to refund the man’s money and give Rorie the night off. With a black eye and split lip, I couldn’t allow her to go back out to work. She’d crowed about her insolence, recounting every word, every blow in their exchange—clinging to her victory, as tiny as it was.
The next night, fortunately, went much more smoothly.
So did the third, and the fourth.
Now she was here, lying listlessly on the dirty mattress next to Macey. Her whole body ached, no doubt. She bore welts and bruises and cuts. Her shoulder was dislocated by one man. Another pulled out her hair when she tried to fight. Again, both of them were too bruised to work, and my associates and I were the ones losing money because of it.
My eyes narrowed as I heard her giggle, an incongruous sound in this hellish place.
“Macey,” she said, poking her friend in the ribs. “I did the math. We’d only have to work a whole year at Chick-Fil-A to pay him back the money we’ve lost today. A whole year! What do you say?”
She giggled again, and I remembered the gift bestowed upon her by that ridiculous excuse for an angel, Arthur. The gift of laughter. Humor, to tide her through dark times.
When Macey didn’t respond, Rorie rolled over and scooched next to the wall, where she began digging her fingernails into the drywall. She was working out the math of the double shifts she would need to work to “pay back” her owner for her nights off. She set it up just like a middle school algebra equation, the dependent variable the number of men who would rape her.
Macey shivered under a sheet and groaned. Rorie sat up, abandoning her math problem to press the cool back of her hand against Macey’s forehead.
“She’s burning up,” she stated, looking at me with accusing eyes.
I knew it was probably the onset of some sexually transmitted disease, but said nothing.
“Can’t you get her a doctor?”
I laughed. “She’s probably just faking it.”
“You can’t fake a fever. There’s nothing here that she could use to spike her temperature.”
Rorie narrowed her eyes, calculating. “If she gets worse, it’s only going to lose you money.”
I laughed, wondering at her ability to play into the game, her resilience and willingness to challenge me, despite it all.
“It doesn’t matter,” I stated baldly. “She’s already given up. No doctor can save her now. I’ll work her as hard as I can until she’s done.”
I left them then, Rorie fussing over Macey’s feverish sleep, surely wondering what was taking Hope and Michael so long.
As was I.
I had planned everything so carefully. From the very beginning, I’d known the soft underbelly of Hope’s confidence was the safety of her sister. The trap I’d sprung might have seemed convoluted to some, but it was the only way I could be sure that I not only physically destroyed Rorie, but that I systematically dismantled her psyche, as well.
That, I knew, was something Hope would never be able to bear. She would see it for what it was—her fault, her failure. And as a result, her damned love for Michael would taste like ashes in her mouth.
A searing jolt of anguish shook my body. Yes, I thought to myself, breathing deeply through the pain. Yes, the destruction of their love—the only thing that had made Michael’s death a real sacrifice—was a just form of revenge. That its instrument was the abduction and violation of a child only underscored what I had asserted all along. It threw mankind’s vileness in God’s face. It forced Him to acknowledge and deal with His abomination.
Thus I would show Him what I’d always known: no human, no one, truly deserves the redemption He offers.
All I had to do now, I told myself, my frail human body quivering with fatigue and anticipation, was wait. There would be no others with me in my moment of glory. No flock of jet-black birds swarming around the site of their destruction. No armor-clad phalanx of the Fallen to back me.
Just me and them, as it should be.
twenty-three
HOPE
Cheered by Tabby’s imminent arrival, I followed Michael and joined him in his search for any sign of the girls. But the man camps proved to be a dead end. Michael stalked the narrow lanes between the sterile metal boxes, crammed full of dirty and restless men, forcing every one he met to stare at the glossy eight-by-ten of Rorie that he bore before him like a cross. By sheer will, he forced them to look him in the eye and tell him whether they’d seen Rorie or anyone like her.
Every answer was the same: a disinterested shrug. It was as if she didn’t exist.
I trailed after Michael as much to keep him from blowing up in frustration as to help in the search. We didn’t give up until the sun had fallen beneath the horizon, the flames from the derricks providing an eerie glow. We did this for two days in a row, covering all the camps until, tense and cold, we decided there was no point. We needed to find a different way. As we walked back through the parking lot, I grappled through my mittens to read Tabby’s message.
“I can’t believe it!”
“What?” Michael responded, his interest piqued by the new note of spirit in my voice.
“She found us a place to stay.”
“Who?”
“Tabby, of course. She’s finally made it. And she sent me directions. C’mon.”
Over rutted dirt and snow we drove, past the crowded strip malls and hastily raised shops, past the Walmart and onto a dirt road. A few blocks in we found it—a nondenominational church that had set up temporary headquarters in what had been a failed daycare.
“Mmmph,” Michael mumbled as we pulled in. I didn’t wait for him to turn off the ignition before I opened the door and ran to throw my arms around Tabby, who’d been waiting for us in the glass storefront.
“I can’t believe you’re here!” I said, squeezing her tight. I pulled back and looked at her, laughing. Her face was wiped clean of makeup, her hair pulled back into a tidy ponytail. She wore a very utilitarian stocking cap and a big, puffy coat. She’d traded in her signature cat-eyed frames for a sober pair of wire-rimmed glasses.
“What happened to you? You look almost …”
“Plain?” she half-laughed, her breath turning to steam in the cold. “That’s the plan. I’m guessing I’m the only black person maybe in this entire zip code, if not the whole state. No need to call attention to myself. Besides, it’s frigid up here! I needed to dress sensibly. My sense of style is just going to have to take a break in favor of frostbite prevention.”
“Ollie?” I asked urgently, wondering what had happened to my faithful aging pet.
She smiled, patting my hand. “Perfectly fine. Past the smoke inhalation damage and enjoying himself at the doggie day spa. Let’s get inside, out of the cold, so I can catch you up on things and you can fill me in on the search.” She arched a brow as she looked behind me. “You too, lover boy. Let me show you around.”
We tromped inside
, shaking off the snow as best we could as she led us down a short hallway. Doors to either side opened into what looked like old classrooms, the windows now discreetly covered with curtains. After a short walk the hallway led into a near dead end with a handful of more utilitarian rooms bunched together. Tabby led us into the first one, an office. A filing cabinet, computer, and tiny desk were all crammed into the space of a closet, behind which sat a benign-looking young man in a Fair Isle sweater. The walls were overlapping with calendars, schedules, and directions of every possible sort, a veritable forest of paperwork.
“Reverend Krinke, meet my friends Hope and Michael,” Tabby began, rubbing her hands together as she nodded toward us. “The ones I told you about.”
The man reached out a hand, rising halfway from behind the desk. “Tabitha has told me a great deal about your efforts here. I am glad to be able to help you. Hopefully, it will give you at least some physical comfort while you search for the girls.”
I turned to Tabby, confused. She grinned, obviously pleased with herself.
“I met Harlan at an ecumenical church conference last year. When I finally put two and two together and realized he was here, where you were, I gave him a call. His church is meeting here, temporarily, while they’re building their new sanctuary. In the meantime, they’ve been hosting homeless families here during the week.” She looked slyly at me. “He kindly offered to let us crash in the open space where they hold services for a few days.”
I looked at Tabby. She grinned. I knew that the Reverend Krinke did not come up with that idea on his own.
Harlan shrugged. “We use the space for meetings and such during the day and weeknights, so normally we don’t let families use it—with them staying here for a few months at a time, it wouldn’t make sense. But as long as you don’t mind packing up your things during the day, you’re more than welcome to stay.”
Dark Before Dawn Page 24