A soft moan escapes my lips. I’d collected a few small pieces of the story before, but not this. Never this nightmare. And I remember well the torrents of need that rushed through my body after the change; how it crushed the humanity right out of me; how I would have killed anything to survive. Anyone.

  “If we could just wait the three hours,” Tarren says. “Whatever else he was, Grand considered himself honorable. He would have unlocked those doors. He did unlock them.”

  As if I could leap backwards across the years to that blood-soaked room, I can almost feel the shudders of need slamming into Tammy as her skin burned. She was a new thing. A desperate thing. And Tarren’s energy so close, calling to her on the waves of a siren’s song. Three hours was too long.

  Impossibly long.

  Tears scrawl down Gabe’s face, and new swirls of blue clamor over the pained reds in his aura. Blue for hope. Oh god.

  “She’s alive,” he says hoarsely and looks around as if Tammy were just waiting in a shadowed corner to make a grand entrance. “Shit. She’s alive. Where is she? I want to see her.”

  “She was in so much pain,” Tarren says. “I told her to wait…just wait a little longer.”

  What was this Tammy like in the throes of torturous hunger? No more mean teases for her twin brother. No more belly laughs. No more scary bravery that she always scraped by on. She must have been so damned scared, maybe for the first time in her short life. And Tarren. All those wounds on him; the map of future scars weeping blood.

  “But she couldn’t,” I say. “No one is stronger than that hunger, not even Tammy.”

  Tarren nods, and I think he is grateful that I said it. Me who never worshipped at Tammy’s feet. Me who understands better than anyone what price the hunger exacts.

  “I made a decision,” Tarren says with somber finality.

  And right here, I need him to stop. Need the words to cease. Because I already know what Tarren, the boy who Gabe once said would follow his sister into hell, decided on that long ago day.

  “I couldn’t walk, so I crawled over to her. She kept scooting back, trying to get away but it was so simple. She needed to feed. It was the only way to stop her pain.” Tarren’s voice goes on, that terrible, robotic monotone. “I wasn’t scared. I told her that. It had to be her. She was more strategically valuable. With her new abilities, she would be even better at hunting the angels. She could save more lives than I could. She needed to live.” A touch of strain enters Tarren’s voice, as if he needs us to understand, to agree with the clear-eyed logic of his decision.

  “She was close to breaking. I pulled myself closer. Near enough to touch her, and then…” Tarren’s voice dwindles. He ducks his head just a little, and the shadows crawl higher on his face, turning his left eye into a black orb. “And then she ran across the room. So fast. When I turned around, she was trying to get the knife, but she couldn’t…couldn’t hold it. Her hands. They were shaking too hard because of the change.”

  I curl my own hands into fists. I can’t actually feel the seams Xing across each palm, but I remember how it felt that night of my change, when the bone and muscles beneath my palms burned away, making room for the feeding orbs.

  “I thought she could do anything….” Tarren says, a hint of wonderment in his voice. “…but not that. She needed help.”

  “No.” The word is a strangled sob. Gabe seems to be shrinking, almost wilting against the Jeep. “Three hours. You waited. YOU WAITED!”

  I’ve seen Tarren routinely make amazing shots. Accomplish nearly impossible rescues. Fight enhanced angels without a trace of fear in his aura. But when he meets Gabe’s terrified gaze, I think it’s the bravest thing he’s ever done.

  “She couldn’t hold the knife,” he says. “She begged me. Tammy begged me.”

  I wait for the rest of the story, the end of it, and I cringe against the craggy waves of Gabe’s aura. Red on red on red. But Tarren is quiet, hands hanging limply at his sides, and I realize that he doesn’t need to tell us the ending.

  He is the ending, standing in front of us. Breathing. Alive.

  Gabe lurches into unsteady movement. I don’t stop him, and neither does Tarren. Gabe grabs Tarren’s shirt and slams his brother into a round concrete pillar.

  “No!” he shrieks. “NO! You wouldn’t. You couldn’t!”

  I can actually see Gabe’s heart breaking, his aura exploding with crimson hues fringed white at the very tips. White. The worst color. Sheer agony. The only other time I’ve seen an aura swallowed by blazing whites was in Tarren’s aura when I drained Gabe in front of his eyes.

  Gabe holds Tarren against the pillar, hands clutched in Tarren’s shirt. “NO!” he cries again. “Tell the truth.”

  His aura slices at my control, and I take small steps backward against the pull of my hunger. The noise of his pain scatters my thoughts, but even in the chaos, I understand his confusion, his refusal to accept. Tarren was ready to sacrifice himself to Tammy; to give his energy to fill her. How could he turn around and plunge a knife into her? What could she have possibly said? How could anything in the world convince him to murder the person he loved, his own heart?

  And there it is. Standing right in front of me, shoving Tarren harder and harder into the pillar. Tammy wasn’t the only one Tarren loved.

  “It was Gabe,” I say. I carefully search through my memory until I find the fragment I need. It was something Tarren said years ago after he was injured rescuing me from a burning home. We’d drugged him while the burns healed.

  I grasp the memory tight and look at my brothers. “Tarren said…Tarren said that Tammy made him promise.” I remember Tarren’s pale, glassy eyes, the irises so huge, and the exquisite pain flooding through his unchecked aura. “You said Tammy made you promise to take care of Gabe. That was the last thing she asked. That’s how she convinced you to…”

  Both my brothers stare at me, and Tarren’s eyes are so…so…sad. I immediately recognize my second terrible mistake of this night; that Tarren was trying to save his brother from this last, cruelest secret.

  “I’m…” I start.

  Gabe makes a noise, wet and gasping and pained. The same noise I think he’d make if someone plunged a dagger into his stomach. His fist flies, and Tarren’s nose erupts with blood. He raises his fist again, and his body shakes, his aura crackling flames of red around him. So much red. So much pain pouring off him. I wrap my arms around my waist and bend over, pinning down my throbbing hands.

  The fist drops limp to Gabe’s side. His face is eerily orange in the overhead light, eyes glittering with unshed tears. He steps back abruptly releasing Tarren’s shirt. The blood flows down Tarren’s lips and patters onto his black shirt. He stares at Gabe, passively waiting to see what he’ll decide to do next. I honestly think that if Gabe took out his gun, Tarren would welcome the bullet.

  “I wish I could hate you.” Gabe’s voice is rough, like he’s speaking from beneath a blanket of sand. “I really, really fucking wish I could.” He turns and starts walking down ramp, swaying a little. He pauses halfway down, fishes in his pocket, and tosses the keys in the general direction of the Jeep.

  I turn to Tarren. His nose looks bad.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. So futile.

  “Grand unlocked the door after three hours, like he promised,” Tarren says. His voice is losing volume. “I carried her out. I found a patch of land just on the other side of the warehouse. I didn’t care if anyone saw me, but I was lucky. The place was abandoned. Grand planned it that way, I suppose. I buried her. It was a shallow grave. I only had my hands, and I was so weak by then. Had trouble concentrating, but I buried her. I wanted to lie down and die next to her.”

  Tarren puts a hand up to his face and tenderly touches his nose. He looks at the dark blood on his fingertips without surprise or worry. I wish he would stop, let the story rest, but now it seems as if he needs to finish it. And that it is my punishment to listen. So I listen.

  “But I’d promised her,” Tarren repeats. “I stole a car and found a pay phone. I called Gabe, and I said Styx, so he would know to leave. To get Dr. Lee out. To start over and never look for us. And then I was done. I’d taken care of him.”

  Tarren is silent, but that still isn’t the end of the story. I know that Gabe, ever the computer whiz even at 18 years old, tracked the pay phone, drove out, and found Tarren, nearly dead, slumped over the wheel of his stolen car. Gabe got Tarren to Dr. Lee just in time to save his life, but Tarren never truly recovered from that day.

  Now, finally, I understand why the man in front of me doesn’t know how to laugh or smile. Why he hides his love so deeply like it is a weakness that must be protected.

  “I went back as soon as I could.” Tarren’s voice is barely a whisper now, as if he is using the very last of his strength to get the words out. “Two weeks, I think. She wasn’t that…” he swallows. “…wasn’t badly decayed. It’d snowed. I took her home.” Another swallow, and finally his words are stumbling, unsteady. “I buried Tammy in the grove, in the grave Gabe already dug for her. That’s where she is. Where she’s been.”

  I think of all the times I’ve walked to the grove with Gabe over the years, watching him pick colorful wildflowers along the way in the spring. Tammy loved bright colors. He’d lay those flowers against the pile of stones he collected for her and tell me again about the things he buried for her, her favorite leather jacket, her childhood diary, a few rings and bracelets. And all that time, Tammy had been right under our feet.

  “Watch Gabe,” Tarren says, pulling me from my thoughts. His face is stoic and his voice is under control again. The red ripples are fading from his aura as he pulls himself back together. Even now, even after all of this, he is still trying to be brave.

  “We need to get you to Lo’s,” I say. “Clean you up. Look at that nose.” I feel suddenly so tired. Ancient with regret. For all these years, I’ve wanted to know the truth about Tammy. I kept digging. Kept pressing on that festering wound inside Tarren’s soul. Now I know, and I think I would give every penny in Vegas to put it all back into Tarren’s head. To undo the catastrophic damage that I’ve created between my brothers.

  “Just watch him,” Tarren says. “Please, Maya. He’s going to...”

  “Drink,” I answer for him, “and we’ll be lucky if that’s all he does.”

  Tarren is right. Gabe’s self-destructive streak is going to come out in full force tonight, and I don’t think he’ll stop with a round of drunken karaoke or porking some lonely divorcee. Yet, a part of me believes that Tarren needs more watching, more care right now. But his pale blue eyes are vulnerable, and he asked this one thing of me after I A-bombed the only good thing he had in his life – Gabe’s admiration.

  “Okay, I’ll make sure he doesn’t get into too much trouble,” I say.

  “Thank you.”

  I leave Tarren dripping blood in the parking garage, the keys to the Jeep still on the ground so he can get to Lo’s mansion. I’ll put Gabe into a motel off the Strip when he drinks himself into a stupor. As I jog down the corner staircase to the ground floor, my mind already searching for the signature of Gabe’s aura, a question stops me hard.

  If the angel in the red dress wasn’t Tammy, who the hell was she?

  Chapter 17 – Gabe

  Consciousness is not a voluntary thing. It’s a nagging bitch, dragging me closer and closer to the surface against my will. Even before I get all the way there, I feel the sunlight pummeling against my eyelids, the raw ache in my throat, and the certain fact that my brain is trying to explode out of my skull.

  My hand gropes and finds a blanket that I pull over my head to block the sun. I am already getting an inkling that something bad happened last night.

  Not bad. Horrible.

  Not horrible. Soul crushing.

  And then alcohol happened. Since I feel like all of me threw up on all of me, a lot of alcohol happened.

  Oooooh, right. My brother murdered my sister. And she begged him to do it ‘cause of me.

  Not enough alcohol then, because I still can’t find it in myself to hate Tarren, which means I have to hate myself instead.

  “Good, you’re awake,” says a voice that sounds like Maya plus a major layer of pissed off.

  “Can’t hear you. Sleeping,” I mutter. My stomach churns dangerously, and more memories begin to jab.

  Grand turned Tammy into an angel.

  The knife.

  Some douchey frat guy throwing shade against my righteous Britney t-shirt. Teaching him a new meaning to the lyrics hit me, baby, one more time. Maya pulling me off.

  Dirt. On Tarren’s hands. When I found him the day Grand cut him up his hands were caked in dirt, and it was on his shirt mixed in with the blood. I’d never asked him about that.

  Whiskey. Neat. How many times did I say that last night? Funny that word. Neat. Clean. Tidy. The opposite of everything I needed my neat whiskey to wash away.

  “Gotta throw up?” Maya asks. “I found some plastic bags last night if you can’t make it to the toilet again.”

  “No,” I lie. “Go away.”

  Tammy is dead. She was dead before, but this is so much worse. I peek out from the blanket. Maya stands in front of the window, the sun lighting her up her shoulder-length reddish-brown hair.

  “They could have made it,” I croak. “Three hours. Just three hours.”

  Maya’s face is calm, her big eyes a faraway blue. A mask. Just like Tarren’s face last night. She’s too much like him. She walks over to the bed and hands me a plastic water bottle that was sitting on the nightstand.

  “There’s no way she could have resisted for that long. She would have killed him,” Maya says.

  “Tammy wouldn’t do that.” My skull seems to be wrenching tighter. Maybe it’ll split wide open. Wouldn’t that be a fun little happening?

  “It’ the hunger, Gabe.” Maya does her little frowny face where her long nose scrunches up. “It’s everything.”

  I remember her face, feral as a rabid raccoon when she threw Tarren into the wall during the cupcake last month. It was like she was possessed. But no, Tarren stopped her. He got her to snap out of it, become Maya again. He could have done that with Tammy.

  Tammy would have been strong enough to resist. She was the strongest person I’ve ever known.

  “She could have waited,” I insist.

  Maya stares at me now, and her eyes are cold. They look almost gray. Like Tarren. Everything like Tarren. “She couldn’t,” she says, but she didn’t know Tammy.

  “She could be randomly nice sometimes,” I say for no reason. “Tammy, that is. It’d come out of nowhere, a real compliment, a ruffle of the hair, or even just a little wink like you were best friends in the world. It was actually kind of scary when she was nice, cause I just never knew if she wanted something or if she was just messing with me.” I force myself to sit up, though none of me is happy by this action. “I never understood her. Tarren didn’t either. Not really. I thought that was part of her life strategy, or whatever. You know, keeping everyone on their toes. Always guessing, always wary. But after she died…” my stomach churns again. “…I think that maybe Tammy never understood herself either.”

  Then I’m out of bed, forcing my wobbly legs across the room as I stagger to the toilet. I manage to slam the door shut behind me before the first wretches start. My knuckles are sore as I grip the edge of the porcelain throne and heave up a dribbling stream of bile. I remember why my knuckles are sore. Tarren’s face. Then a table, I think. Then the frat boy’s gym-hardened abs. Then a clown standing in front of one of the casinos. I have no justification for that one, other than the universal fact that clowns are creepy as hell.

  Another dry heave. My knees press into the cool bathroom tile. I’m not at all surprised that my clothes are gone. It happens when I’m drunk, but I’ve still got my Batman boxer briefs on, so Maya should be pleased that I followed her Gabe-drunk rule.

  I sit back from the toilet and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. My jeans are crumpled in the corner like some sad piece of roadkill. Out of habit rather than conscious effort, I drag my cell phone out of my pocket. Still a sliver of battery left.

  I pull up Pierce’s email…and yup. Somehow I’m not surprised to see a new email sitting on top of his in-box with the title, Conclave. I check the time stamp. Came in yesterday afternoon when Maya and I were making the rounds at the poker table.

  We killed Pierce over two months ago. His sister filed a missing person’s report a week later. All the normal emails from work and friends and his crazy angel cronies have long dried up. And yet, some doofus somewhere forgot to take him off the evil angel leadership email list.

  Maya and Tarren would laugh, but I know what this is. Destiny.

  I tap open the message.

  Horsemen,

  The Conclave will commence tomorrow at noon. Your presence is required. The Angels of Mercy will beseech us to delay our plans, but if the Lord opens their hearts, we can make them brothers and fellow soldiers to our cause…blah, blah blah, more bat shit crazy religious rambling.

  Basically, it seems like these Angel of Mercy guys want War and his cult to simmer down, and War wants to recruit them into whatever evil plan he’s concocting. I scan the rest of the message for what I really need and find an address.

  Destiny does her little boogey woogey again, cause this little shindig is taking place right here, in Nevada, just a few hours outside of Las Vegas. That’s not lucky. That’s providence. It means the big guy or the universe or Santa Clause is telling me I’ve got to crash this little wings party, and my potluck dish is going to have a whole lot of lead in it.

  I glance at the clock on my phone. 10:16 AM. Okay, no big deal. I’m soberish, and the meeting will take at least a few hours anyway. Plenty of time to grab some wheels, head over, and…

  Bang, Bang. “You fall in?” Maya says behind the door.

  Oh yeah, her.

 

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