“What makes you so sure?”

  Tarren shakes his head. “It’s always been too dangerous to interrogate angels. Their differing abilities create too many unknowns, too many risks. Until now. Maya, if The Exalted do exist, that means there’s a central authority. That means they have records and meetings, lists of names.”

  Tarren keeps his voice even, almost quiet, but I can see the sheen of mania in his eyes, in the taut, bright colors that lick out from his body. “It means we won’t have to pluck each leaf off the tree. We can pull the whole thing up by the roots.”

  I think about Diana’s number one rule when it comes to killing angels, never hesitate. Evidently even Tarren is capable of some flexibility. I wonder if this makes him practical or a hypocrite. I also wonder if there isn’t a whole secret world inside Tarren’s head. How did he come up with that scented blindfold?

  Tarren is gazing at me. I push my thoughts out of the way. Who the hell cares how he thinks as long as this will help me find and kill Grand.

  “I understand,” I say to him. “I want to do it.”

  Tarren nods with approval. “We’ll keep you covered Maya.”

  A spark of pale orange—the color of a ripe tangerine—lights up in his aura, and I still haven’t ciphered what this shade means on the Tarren color scale. I’ve seen hints of it before, mostly when he gives me those moody stares, but I remember how it swallowed so much of his aura the time I caught him gazing at his scarred body in his cracked bedroom mirror.

  ***

  We, Tarren and I, sit across the table from each other and spend the next three hours sketching out a plan. His energy is tight, and I keep trying to swallow these growing boulders in my throat.

  I don’t think about Kyle, We’re going to do right by you Little One, or how Jane’s face softened when she learned I’d been turned against my will. They are shapeless gray forms. Targets. Cans of Spaghettios.

  Tarren’s voice is confident and fluid, and I follow along, just like we’re running. Stride for stride. It feels like we’re actually a team. Like I count, and he really does care about me, though I know he’s just keeping the bait on board.

  When we’ve churned mental miles running through the plan a dozen times, Tarren finally calls it a night. We both wait for the other to make the first move. Then we stand up together and realize that we each have to get to the other side of the room.

  “I’m just going to…” I motion toward the cage of mice in the corner behind Tarren.

  “Yeah, that’s....” Tarren steps out of the way, and I cross in front of him, feeling the tug of his energy.

  Tarren doesn’t sing in the shower, and he finishes up in the bathroom too soon. He comes out while I’m still draining my second rat, and I kind of hunch my shoulders over so he can’t see—but he knows and turns and stares at the door until he hears me zipping up the corpses in the black nylon pouch.

  “Sorry,” I whisper.

  Tarren doesn’t say anything, and I go to the bathroom and concentrate way too hard on brushing my teeth. When I crawl into my bed, Tarren turns off the lamp on the nightstand between us.

  “Goodnight,” I say, and, after a slight pause, he says it softly back to me.

  The glow of Tarren’s energy—bumpy with hiccups as he finally loosens his control—outlines the form of his body, and I watch as he shifts around, trying to get comfortable. This is torture, the two of us not saying anything. I try to conjure Ryan’s ghost to distract myself, but he doesn’t come to me.

  Eventually, Tarren’s aura lulls into softer blues, and he snores a little, which is kind of funny. He sleeps lightly, and his twitching energy tugs at my hunger, until I give up on sleep and pull out my notebook. The only thing I can seem to write is this dumb diary. These ugly confessions. This suffocating self-pity. It’s just that I can’t, can’t, can’t think about what I’ll have to do tomorrow—I glance at the clock...well, technically today I guess.

  Gabe staggers past our door at 3:00 a.m.. He stops at his room and mutters a curse as he misses the card reader twice before yanking open his door. I follow the sounds of his heavy footfalls as he makes his way across the room. As far as I can tell, he only manages to get his coat and one shoe off before he collapses onto the bed and doesn’t get up again.

  Tarren’s aura spikes. I twist toward him, tugged by the leash of his energy. As his aura jolts again, I feel myself losing it, the song ramping up—but I know this game now. I ball my hands into fists, haul up the shields inside my mind, and set my teeth hard against each other.

  He’s lying on his stomach, head turned away from me, and I can see his powerful shoulders tensing. His aura leaps again, higher, un-restrained by his usual control. The bulbs punch out of each of my palms, and I know it would help my control if I didn’t look, but I can’t take my eyes off his energy.

  Tarren’s aura is almost incandescent, filled with a tapestry of shifting colors that I’ve never seen in him before. So many secrets streaming off his body, but I don’t know what they mean, only that he suffers from them. Suffers greatly. It has to be Tammy he dreams of.

  His energy ratchets up, peaking in a flourish of red that nearly short-circuits my brain. Almost too late, I slip back down into my bed and close my eyes. Tarren snaps awake. His heart is a clamoring cymbal that fills the room, accompanied by his ragged breaths. He struggles mightily to pull his body under control, swallowing his breaths, calming down his heart. Sweat beads across his forehead, and his aura is shaky and pale.

  “Don’t say anything,” he whispers.

  Lonely brother.

  I sit up and throw off my covers. Tarren turns, watches as I get up out of bed and assume a pushup position on the floor. I wait for him, but he just stares at me.

  I start my pushups, slow and even, closing my eyes and letting my muscles pulse. After a pause, Tarren slips out of his bed. He stands over me, but I just keep on doing those fucking pushups.

  Tarren crouches down, gets into pushup position shoulder-to-shoulder with me, waits until I’m all the way up, then follows me back down. He matches my pace. I keep going, looking straight ahead. When red hues start rippling along Tarren’s chest and triceps, I lie on my back and start on crunches. Tarren follows me. Eventually, I move us to lunges. After the last one, I stand up. Tarren stands too. His long sleeve shirt is damp with sweat. He’s breathing hard, but his energy is steady.

  I don’t know what to say, so I turn and crawl into my bed. I have no idea what time it is. Tarren takes a quick shower then lies down on his bed. We never even looked at each other. I turn toward the window, intent on waiting out the night. Instead, I fall into an easy sleep; the best I’ve ever had on the road.

  Chapter 17

  The door to trailer sixteen swings open before I knock.

  “There she is!” Kyle’s face breaks into a wide smile. Welcome back Little One.

  “Hi,” I mumble and rub my arm. The wind is a cool whisper on the back of my neck.

  “What do you think?” He frames his face with both hands. “Better with the makeup, right?”

  Kyle has shaggy black hair. His eyes are too wide apart, his nose too long, and his chin too weak, but when he smiles everything seems to line up just right; like his features were set askew for just this purpose.

  “You, uh, look distinguished.”

  Kyle laughs. “I’ll have to remember that one. Don’t just stand there.” He beckons me into the trailer. I hesitate. Gabe insisted that I stay outdoors where he and Tarren could maintain a clear shot. Course, he also wanted me to wear a wire, but that wasn’t happening.

  “We don’t bite,” Kyle says.

  I give him a nervous smile and step into the trailer. It’s larger inside then I expected, clean and bright. The side wall is a quilt of colors. Postcards, I realize; a collage covering the whole wall. Jane has her long legs stretched out on a beige couch. She stares at me over the lip of a book, presenting the perfect Snow White visage: milky skin, rosebud mouth, and ebony hair cut short and combed into smooth waves around her head.

  Her expression is hard as she swings her legs around and places the book on the floor, face down. “It’s good that you came back,” she says. “You need to learn.”

  “Thanks.”

  The hum jacks up in my head, which, I think, means the two of them are mind talking. I turn away, study the collage, and try not to dissolve into a puddle of mucky fear.

  Each postcard has a number penned in the corner. Seven for Anchorage. Three for Sioux Falls. Six for the whole state of Connecticut. I fixate on this card. It says, “Greeting from Connecticut.” Each large bubbled letter contains a wholesome scene from the state: a watermill, a ship coasting on the harbor, a tall lighthouse that I recognize as Five Mile Point, a family picnicking in the sunlight. I lived in Connecticut my whole life—at least as much of it as I can remember—and my family never once had a picnic. There wasn’t enough anti-bacterial hand sanitizer in the world to get Karen outside for any extended period of time.

  I come back to that number. Six. Do they record their kills in each city they pass through?

  “We rate them.” Kyle puts a bottle of water in my hand. “I thought Connecticut was a seven, but this one is very hard to please.” He jerks his thumb at Jane.

  “You always believe the best in everything,” she challenges back, “and everyone.” Jane pins me with another suspicious look. “Where did you come from? How did you find us? We don’t even know your name.”

  “Darling,” Kyle starts.

  “No Kyle.” Jane looks up at him. “She needs to answer the question. We can’t be stupid about this.”

  “It’s okay,” I tell Kyle. I fiddle with the cap on the water bottle as I screw my courage.

  “My name is Laurel Wilkens,” I begin. Tarren and I spent last night mapping out the story, and Gabe found me a plausible identity this morning. The lies fall readily off my tongue. I tell them about my rich ex-boyfriend, Garret, who had a temper and didn’t like the “ex” part so much. How he had no trouble trespassing the restraining order.

  Jane pats the couch next to her, and I sit down. I describe a scuffle in my driveway where a wild-eyed Garret threw me into the cab of his pickup with amazing strength. My voice grows hushed and quivery as I tell them about the wild drive into the desert, and the two needles Garret plunged into me. This next part needs no lies or embellishments. I describe the pain of the transformation.

  The two angels listen, and even Jane’s face grows soft.

  Still huffing and shuddering, I tell them about the cop who pulled up just as Garret was readying the final injection and how Garret jumped out of the car to take care of him, leaving the keys in the truck’s ignition.

  Now, the big sell. I close my eyes and let the tears wind their way down my face. I describe how I slipped into the driver’s seat and mindlessly careened down the desert roads until I lost the pavement and hit a clump of shrubs. A good samaritan stopped to help, but something happened to my hands. I grabbed hold of him, needing something that I couldn’t even begin to describe. He spasmed and choked and then he was dead with my hands still on him. Monster hands. I left his body in the desert, took his car, and drove as far away from Lubbock as I could. His wallet was sitting in the cup holder, and it had enough cash to buy another tank of gas.

  Here’s the riskiest part of the story. Tarren thinks it’ll pass muster as a believable ability. I’m not so sure. Good thing my voice is supposed to be trembling like a willow reed caught in a storm. “I…I…was drawn to the park,” I whisper. “I don’t know how, but I had a…a…sense. And then you two found me.”

  I look down at my gloved hands and press my thumb against the tender center of my right palm. “I don’t know what Garret did to me,” I huff, “but I know I’m dangerous. I can’t ever go back. I might hurt my family. I got a little sister. I’m sorry.” I wipe the tears away from my chin. “I’m just so…so scared.”

  Jane glances at Kyle. The humming revs up in my head, and I shiver. Did I overdo it with the tears and shaky voice? Was the “sense” I described in finding them so obvious a lie? There’s also still this terrible, tingling fear that Kyle doesn’t just speak inside people’s heads. If he can get any thread of my thoughts, then he knows, and he and Jane are probably discussing how to kill me without getting any blood on the carpet. I glance up at the window and wonder if Tarren and Gabe have any kind of shot. The trailer is suddenly small, suffocating, and spinny; probably because I’ve forgotten to breathe again.

  “You’ve been treated real bad,” Kyle says at last. “That boy, he shouldn’t have done that to you. His Guide should have taught him better.”

  “Should’ve never been turned to begin with,” Jane snaps. “There’s no standards anymore. No respect for The Other Side.”

  “The what?” I ask.

  “The Other Side,” Kyle says with a wan smile. “Our side, that is. It means, uh,” he glances at Jane, “kind of a code of conduct we’re supposed to follow. A Guide’s duty is to protect those he or she chooses to Ascend, to teach the Cherubs how to survive.”

  There’s a code to this thing?” I look up at Jane.

  “There was.” She nods, and her voice drops. “Even villains have rules.”

  “We’re not villains, love,” Kyle counters. “We’re revolutionaries. We’re ushering in the next age of human evolution.”

  “He thinks we’re on a noble quest,” Jane informs me.

  “And my beautiful wife thinks we’re unholy monsters.” Kyle grins and raises his hands above his head. “Bogga, wogga, ugga!”

  Jane frowns. “That’s not funny.”

  When it becomes apparent that they don’t plan on killing me, I try not to let my breath out in a big relieved whoosh.

  “I have so many questions,” I say. “I don’t even know where to begin.” Cheesy line, but it works.

  Jane turns to me and purses her lips for a moment, thinking. “Let’s start with what we are,” she says. “Someone, somewhere, had a real crappy sense of humor. They called this…well, us…Angels.”

  ***

  At my request, we exit the trailer and step into the barren fields behind the large circus tent. A few of the workers and other performers amble about or sit on their trailer steps. A dog scampers around, sniffing and lifting its leg every so often.

  Gabe and Tarren are out here somewhere, squinting down the scopes of their sniper rifles, though I can’t catch any sense of them. I shiver and cut off those thoughts.

  “Let’s find someplace a little more quiet,” Jane says next to me.

  “What about the woods?” I nod to the patch of thin trees huddled together in the distance.

  We start walking. I rub my arm absently. Jane holds out her hand and Kyle takes it. The wind is cold and mean today. Jane is only wearing a pair of studded jeans and a silky red tank top that matches her lipstick. I wait for goose bumps to spring across her exposed arms, but she and Kyle both seem perfectly comfortable in the low temperatures.

  They tell me their own story. Kyle was a hotshot attorney working eighty hour weeks, throwing back blood pressure medication like breath mints. After a decade of sacrifice, he made partner. Besides a corner office, another perk was an invite into a very exclusive club.

  “This was thirteen years ago,” Kyle muses. “Things were different back then.”

  “The Other Side. More of the angels followed the code,” Jane says. “There were standards, an authority structure. We were kind of like this big extended family. And now it’s just…” She looks at Kyle.

  He grins. “Hell in a hand basket.”

  “Something like that,” Jane murmurs.

  Their clasped hands swing to and fro.

  “It wasn’t a difficult decision, for me at least,” Kyle continues. “Truth is, I looked around at the world, and I realized we’re fucked, you know?” Kyle laughs. “We’ve got half the population starving to death and living in hovels while the other half is obese and miserable as hell in their big mansions. We can’t seem to stop hating each other and warring over something pointless. Usually religion, the thing that preaches harmony and love. Pretty sad, huh?”

  “Greed,” Jane says.

  “Yeah, greed,” Kyle agrees. “This ship is going down, and I’m thinking it’s going to be sooner rather than later.” Kyle shrugs. “Becoming an angel was a chance to start over. It sounded so damn exciting.”

  “I said ‘no’,” Jane cuts in, “absolutely not. We are not going to start killing people.”

  We breach the woods, and banded shadows sweep across us as we walk. The dead leaves are thick and loud beneath our feet. Even as I listen to them speak, my spine seizes at every sudden trill from a bird or the rattle of leaves when the wind blows.

  “We had some bad fights, didn’t we, darling?” Kyle brings Jane’s hand to his mouth and kisses her knuckles. “This one, she was a vegetarian. Couldn’t imagine taking energy from living things.”

  Jane looks down at her boots. “Do we have to tell this story?”

  “Come on, it was a long time ago.”

  Kyle looks at me. “We made a compromise. Jane agreed to the Ascension, and we both swore to each other that we’d never take a human life.” He laughs abruptly, and Jane pulls her hand from his grip. “I lasted two weeks,” he admits. “Jane got through the entire month, but only because she didn’t leave the house.”

  “I killed the mailman,” Jane tells me in a flat voice. “People saw. That was it. Our Guide cleaned everything up, but we had to leave.”

  “Everyone knew the mailman was an alcoholic.” Kyle puts his hand around Jane’s waist and pulls her into his body. “Those were hard times for us. We wandered, aimless, wiling away our life’s savings, still learning about our new bodies. Jane hated the killing, didn’t you?”

  “I still hate it,” Jane says, though her voice lacks conviction.

  The easy smile comes off of Kyle’s face. “I know baby,” he whispers to her, “but it’s not so bad anymore, right?”