“What, you gonna pat me down or something?” I ask, raising an eyebrow. I can almost feel the sweat popping off my brow.

  “Security protocol,” he says.

  “Jesus,” I say as I hold my arms out.

  I hate the feel of his hands running down my body, because I know how easy it would be for him to lose control, for his hands to split open and slurp up all my energy. Been on that ride before and it sucked balls. As he pats down my legs, I can see the strain of the hunger in his face. I haven’t lived with Maya this long without learning exactly what that look means. He takes the pocketknife out of my back pocket, turns it around in his hand and returns it. I notice a faded four leaf clover tattoo on the inside on his wrist.

  Lego Man steps back, and I’m not surprised he missed all three of my lock picks. He puts his radio to his mouth. “We’ve got one individual heading around back to fix a sprinkler. Caucasian. Baseball hat.” Pause. “Britney Spears t-shirt and jeans. He’s been cleared.”

  While he talks, I reach into the driver’s seat of the truck and pull out a small tool bag. I’m sure it’s just my imagination, but I swear I can hear my Berettas banging around inside. If this angel were any good at his job, he would check my bag too, and then I’d be utterly finished.

  “Check,” says a voice on the other end of his radio.

  “Alright, go,” he says.

  Son of a diabetic goat, I got in. My incompetence has never paid off this well in the past, so I blame it all on the lucky hat. I sling the tool bag over my shoulder and nod toward his hand, the one with the clover tattoo. “You hedging your bets?”

  He frowns and reaches to touch the sideways cross hanging from his neck. “Not anymore.”

  “Good for you,” I say and pretend that I actually mean it. “Should take me ‘bout 15 minutes to fix the one sprinkler and then I’ll check on the rest.”

  I turn and start toward the backyard. Since I’ve thought out exactly no part of my plan, I have no idea what I’m going to do from here, but I’m not too worried. I’ve gotten farther than I have any right to expect just winging it. By the power vested in my lucky hat, my Britney Spears t-shirt, and my Batman boxers, I know that someway, somehow, I’ll get a shot at War, and when that happens, you better believe my aim will be true.

  Chapter 20 – Maya

  I walk very carefully, very slowly toward the mansion where, a minute earlier, Gabe pulled up to the gate in the stolen gardener’s truck. He’d spoken to a panel at the gate, and after a little back and forth, the gate had rumbled open and his truck had motored in.

  I’m not exactly sneaking. There is nowhere to sneak, no trees to hide behind. My black outfit was completely appropriate last night, tracking an angel in the dark, but it’s flagrant in the bright sunshine of day.

  I have no fucking clue what I’m doing. No plan. No idea what the hell is behind the gate to the splendid estate where Gabe apparently wants to die. Oh, he’s going to die alright. I’m going to kill him and then find a way to revive him so I can kill him again and again so he gets the taste of stupid sacrifice out of his system.

  I hesitate as I come close to the high wall that surrounds the property. Above the wall, I can just barely see the edge of the roof of the main home set far back from the entrance. There’s no telling what’s on the other side of that wall except for a very idiotic brother, so I climb up and over the wall of the neighboring house and land in some rather beautiful geraniums.

  This home is also far away from the wall, looming in the distance. I close my eyes, reach, and feel only the small auras of pets within. I hold my breath, ears pricked for the sound of a motion alarm going off. Nothing. I spot a few cameras mounted on the home and quickly move along the wall, trampling more geraniums as I go. If the home has active security – someone watching the camera feeds – I’ll be hearing sirens soon. Damn. I pray that the cameras are passive, recording and archiving their footage for future perusal when the homeowner – or more likely his gardener – discovers my geranium massacre.

  Already, I feel vulnerable and clumsy…and I’m not even at the right house yet!

  I touch the Glock in the holster at my hip and wish I’d chosen to wear my second Glock last night. Instead, I’d strapped on a tranq gun just in case we needed to put any civvies into an instant nap while we did our dirty work. Now, I only have 14 rounds – no, scratch that, 13 rounds, since I took a potshot at the femme fatale angel last night – and some tranqs to take on whatever my brother just walked into.

  This is definitely about the time I need to call Tarren, but what could he do? Throw himself into the fire too? I have zero information and zero time, not to mention that I have no idea where Tarren is and what he’s doing. Now, when it is so clearly too late, I realize that I should have called him when Gabe brazenly stole that car at the motel. Which means it’s just me and the 13 rounds in my Glock.

  I move swiftly along the side wall that separates the two properties. With a deep breath I try to calm my emotions. If there are angels on the other side of this wall – and I’d bet the ugly jean skirt I wore yesterday that there are – I don’t want them to catch a feel for my half aura, dim as it is.

  When I’m as calm as possible under the circumstances, I jump up and my fingers dig into the crevices of the stone. I climb up the wall until my hands reach the top. Ever so slowly I pull myself up until I can peek just above the lip of the wall, and I have a sight line into the other property.

  Whoa! Does a Saudi Arabian prince live here, or Oprah? Even Lo’s mansion looks modest in comparison to this palace-in-training. My eyes sweep across a tennis court in the distance, a huge pool that might qualify as a lake, and even a pair of stables on the far side of the property. Stables!

  The house, if I can use such a word to describe the massive collection of pillars, windows, balconies, and seemingly endless rooms within, sits squarely in the middle of the property in front of a circular driveway. I don’t miss the collection of glitzy cars arrayed around that driveway, and I’m only clearly feeling a single aura on the entire property…

  Cow balls!

  Gabe chats with a squat man, sporting a haircut so square it would make any Marine proud. I search for an aura around Gabe’s new best friend. Nothing. Empty air.

  Angel.

  Square Head isn’t the only one in view. Goons. Real life goons in expensive black suits, sunglasses, and guns at their hips stand sentry around the house. I count three in my line of sight with a fourth patrolling near the pool. They look so ridiculous, like they’ve been plucked right out of a movie casting line for Secret Service extras, but there’s nothing funny about their lack of auras. Then I catch sight of the sideways crosses dangling from every neck. My fingers dig into the stone wall, and I hear the hiss of my own breath shooting out between my teeth.

  Gabe didn’t just cruise into trouble with a smile slapped on his face. He drove right into the lion’s den.

  On purpose.

  With no backup.

  I’ve spent the last three years worrying like hell that Tarren would nobly throw himself off a convenient cliff if it meant saving the life of an innocent. But it’s Gabe, my happy-go-lucky, Batman boxer-wearing, fearless shower-crooner brother who took the leap.

  And I have no idea how I can save him.

  I watch Square Head pat Gabe down, and I’m sure he’ll find a gun or at least see something suspicious in Gabe’s aura. But he only claims a pocketknife, examines it, and hands it back to Gabe. As my gaze follows the gentle swing of the sideways cross hanging from Square Head’s neck, my mind is quickly cobbling together a story. All those six-figure cars in the driveway don’t belong to the goons. Some big meet is going down inside the house.

  War is here. I know it. Only his arrogant little pig mind would dress his acolytes up like his own personal Secret Service patrol. Time seems to move forward in herky jerky chunks as my mind spins with this realization. Gabe knew about this meet, and he didn’t tell us. He came here. By himself. To die.

  Why? Why? Why? We could have planned something. Called in the Totem for backup. Anything besides a hapless suicide mission.

  Square Head walks back to the house, and Gabe saunters across the driveway, a small tool bag in one hand. His eyes scan the windows, but the blinds are down.

  I force my frantic thoughts to slow and push all my welling anger to the backburner. The epic screaming rant I’m already planning to hurl at Gabe can wait until he’s not surrounded and insanely outnumbered by our greatest enemies. Until then, I need to focus on the present and figure out a way to pull my brother from the jaws of his own stupid, reckless, self-induced demise.

  And then, because obviously things are not nearly fucked up enough, they get so much more complicated. It starts with a heavy shroud of static descending over my mind, followed by a familiar mental touch instantly rebuilding a bridge that stood between me and another two years ago.

  This is a very inconvenient time to come for a visit, Gem’s mental voice says in my mind. Faint echoes of his thoughts and emotions follow his words down the bridge. Sad. Gem is sad. For me. For this trap I’ve so blindly walked in.

  My brother went in, I think back to him. I feel Gem’s presence expanding inside my mind as he probes my thoughts. My first instinct is to fight back as I did the first time we met, but I remind myself that Gem is my half-brother and a friend. At least I thought so. But if he’s close enough to connect with my mind, that means he must be inside the house or on the property somewhere.

  Is War in there? I demand. Are you working with him?

  A pause. Dim echoes of regret and indecision float across our mental bridge. It has become necessary to open discussions with him, Gem responds as carefully as a politician confronted with sexting pics of his little senator saluting. Your brother came here to kill him.

  I think about War, about how much I hate him. How very, very much he needs to die. But Gabe is more important than seeing War’s severed head on a pike. I can always find a way to kill War tomorrow. There is and will always be just one shining Gabe in this world, and I will do fucking anything to keep him in it.

  War doesn’t matter, I think to Gem. I need to get Gabe out. I don’t even try to hide my desperation, my rising panic, as I realize how vast and deep the ocean of shit is before us. Can you, like, do some bendy wendy mind shroud on us?

  I have no idea what the limit of Gem’s mental abilities are. I’ve seen him do some pretty spectacular stuff beyond just normal mind reading. Chief among those was planting my happy family picnic fantasy in Tarren’s mind to counteract his nightmares.

  War brought a mentalist with him. To keep me honest, I suppose, Gem responds. Can mental voices sound wry? I’m trying to block him now, Gem adds. Your brother’s intentions are quite clear…and loud.

  I’ll get him out, I think desperately. Can you make us invisible? Just for a few minutes?

  I have no right to ask this. Gem owes me nothing. Less than nothing. I’m the one crashing his party after all. But he’s already inside my head, perusing my thoughts like he was flipping through a picture book, so he understands what’s at stake. Why I must ask. No, beg.

  He might just help me, too. Gem is a good person. He wouldn’t have saved me in Peoria if he weren’t, and he definitely wouldn’t feel so guilty about the part he played in Tarren’s scars if he were anything like our biological father, Grand. I can still feel his need for redemption in faint waves through our shared bridge.

  I’ve never done anything like that before, he thinks after a slight pause. Your brother won’t go willingly anyway. He came here to die.

  And don’t those words feel just like someone shoved my heart through a meat grinder.

  Sorry, Gem adds.

  I’ll take care of my brother, I think back to him.

  Speaking of Gabe, I watch him stroll around the yard, nodding jovially at the guards. He crouches down and gazes hard at a sprinkler just in front of a long stone bar that wraps around half of a huge patio in the back of the house. He mutters to himself as he unzips his bag. I have a perfect view of him from my perch, but I realize that the bar blocks him from the sight of the standing guards. He glances around, then quickly pulls two guns from his bag and tucks them into the waistband on his jeans.

  I think I can do it, Gem says, though I feel a draft of uncertainty through our connection.

  Think? You think you can do it? I wonder if my mental voice sounds as shrill as the thoughts feel in my head.

  It’s a complicated thing, Gem says in that simple way of his that I remember. I’ll need to be in each of their minds simultaneously.

  Okay, I say, because I trust Gem. I have to. I’ve thought about Gem a lot over the past two years. Though our initial contact was brief, he walked through my mind, discovered every nook and cranny of my thoughts, and I felt the whispers of his mind too. So much regret. Sadness. A life he never wanted. The burden of a movement – The Angels of Mercy – that he feels too weak to shoulder.

  Give me a moment. Gem’s mental voice sounds strained.

  My fingertips burn against the rough stone of the wall, and I can feel my pulse fluttering in my temple like a bird taking wing. I suddenly wonder where Gem is inside of the cavernous house.

  Okay, go. Be quick, he thinks.

  I swing myself up and over the wall, landing just beyond the line of shrubbery on the other side. I’m in the plain view of the two goons standing in front of the porch. With their sharp angel senses, they should have heard my landing like it was a cannon ball. But they don’t flinch, don’t start shooting.

  I let out a shaky breath and make a dash for Gabe.

  “Shit! We got, we got intruders!”

  I trace the cry to a goon emerging from around the other side of the house about 100 meters away. He already has his gun out and pointed.

  I missed him, Gem says with clear regret. I’m sorry.

  Not as sorry as I’m about to be, because there’s no way I can grab my gun and shoot before the goon gets a round off. I dive to the ground, waiting to feel the sharp, hot spark of a bullet plowing through my body.

  BANG!

  I feel nothing as I hit the ground and roll, but that doesn’t mean anything. The last time I was shot, I didn’t even realize it for a good five minutes. I have my gun out, ready to fire as I come up onto a knee, but the goon is down, spread eagle on the grass. Blood seeps from a gaping wound in his temple.

  “Cover!” Gabe hollers behind me, and it suddenly makes sense how the goon suddenly sprouted a bullet hole in his head. Another goon comes running around the western corner. I’m ready, and he goes down in a single shot. I run crouched and dive behind the patio bar, while Gabe picks off another goon who comes around the eastern side of the house. I hear footsteps clamoring against something hard. I follow the sound, look up, and shoot just as I see a head pop into view over the curve of the roof.

  BANG!

  Arc of blood, and the head disappears. I hear the body hit the clay roof tiles and the limp thud a few seconds later as it plummets to the ground on the other side of the house.

  “You’re not supposed to be here!” Gabe hollers. He crouches next to me, his back to mine as we each cover one side of the bar.

  “Whoops,” I say back.

  He pops up and then back down. “One coming from the back, eight o’ clock.”

  The ground suddenly feels warm under the thin layer of my pants. Then toasty. “You feel that?” I whisper. The ground is getting hot. Seriously, egg-frying-on-the-sidewalk hot. Gabe and I share a look. Some sort of angel power.

  “Eight o’clock?” I whisper.

  Gabe nods.

  I leap up and shoot even as I’m rising.

  BANG! BANG!

  It’s a messy shot, but I hit him, because he staggers, and his shot hits the window behind me. My second shot takes him in the neck, and he’s twitching on the ground when I drop back down and resume my post, covering the western side of the house.

  “Keep an eye on the roof, too,” I huff at Gabe.

  “At least they can’t shoot us from the inside,” he mutters. I follow his gaze to the small spider web of cracks the angel’s bullet made in the window. Shatterproof glass. Nice touch.

  The ground is cooling off, so at least I don’t have to worry about my shoes melting into the pavement.

  “Why the fuck are you here?” Gabe’s voice isn’t angry any longer, and I wish it were. Anything is better than the unbearable sadness I hear and then see shining through his aura when I glance at him over my shoulder.

  “There’s no…”Gabe doesn’t finish the sentence, but I do it for him.

  “No way out,” I say. “What were you thinking? You want to die?”

  “I just…” he shrugs, “wanted to make a difference. In this fight.”

  “That’s not good enough!” I shriek, and I didn’t know until this moment how furious I was. Hopelessly furious, because doesn’t Gabe know that there is no way I can live on this dinky planet without him?

  “I think we killed most of the guys outside,” Gabe says gruffly. “Should be two left, and then whoever they’ve got inside.”

  I peek over the bar. The back wall is impossibly far away, past the pool, past the tennis courts. Too far to run without getting picked off. Our best bet is to make a run for one of the side walls and then cut to the front and get to the street. It’s a good 150 yards to the wall on either side. The house covers us for the first 40 yards in either direction, but then we’ll be out in the open for an impossibly dangerous sprint. Anyone crouched on the side of the house or at the front corner could easily pick us off, especially because Gabe won’t be able to climb up the wall on his own.

  We’re trapped, I think to Gem. He must be able to feel my hopelessness. My numbing fear.

  It’s quiet. Like we’re living on borrowed time in the eye of a hurricane. Gabe must be thinking the same thing.

  “They’re probably regrouping,” he says and sucks in his cheeks. “If they were smart, they’d send teams around each side and one over the roof at the same time.”