It’s not cold, but I can’t stop shivering.

  Tarren snatches the bar from Gabe, turns, and sulks away without a word. Gabe leans back against the car, looks at me, and says, “What the hell is wrong with us?”

  I look down at my blood-splattered chest. “I need some towelettes,” I inform him.

  ***

  The afternoon fades into dusk, and we’re here for the long haul. After changing into a new bra and shirt, I lie across the SUV’s backseat, while Gabe sits up front working to crack into the laptop he pulled from Jane and Kyle’s trailer. When he does, he hooks it up to his own and initiates a full data transfer while watching the feeds from the cameras he set up around their trailer.

  We’ll do right by you Little One. Why can’t I get Kyle’s words out of his head? Why won’t that little reel of imaginary footage—us strolling down the boardwalk—stop flickering through my mind? They could have changed me. We could have fed on heroine dealers and traveled all around the country together.

  I pick at my fingers until they bleed.

  Gabe methodically combs through Jane’s purse. He hasn’t removed the gloves that he and Tarren both donned before entering Jane and Kyle’s trailer.

  “No phone,” he says after a minute of searching. “Remember if she had it on her?”

  “Yes.” She’d pulled it out to check the time.

  Gabe is quiet, thinking. “That’s not good,” he finally announces. He looks back at me. I just shrug.

  We’ll do right by you Little One.

  The Lamp of Destiny starts and ends. I ignore Gabe’s aura, the tantalizing notes of music that make me ache. I remember what Kyle told me. Unless I feed on human energy, the hunger will never get better; the song will never fade.

  Toward morning, it is decided that Gabe and I will dispose of the body while Tarren stays on point at the trailer.

  “Just don’t do anything stupid,” Gabe demands over the phone after they have spent five minutes arguing. His aura is prickly. “If she comes back, peg her at a distance…Swear it….On Mom’s grave…” He waits. My hands glow a little. “Okay,” he says softly, “good.”

  While I wait in the SUV and watch the feeds on his laptop, Gabe sneaks back into the trailer and replaces all the things he and Tarren took. When Gabe returns to the car, he pulls out his phone. I recognize the number he’s dialing.

  “No,” I tell him.

  “Lo might want the body.”

  “No.” I shake my head. No one is cutting up Kyle.

  Gabe looks at my face and cancels the call.

  ***

  Gabe and I bury Kyle about two hours outside of Dallas. The shifting soil makes this a difficult grave to dig. The temperature keeps dropping. Gabe sweats despite the cold and sheds his duster. Steam rises up off his exposed skin. Gabe is not big or as ripped as Tarren, but he is strong. Tight, lean muscles tense along his shoulders, triceps, and forearms as he digs.

  The digging does nothing to dampen the march of my thoughts.

  We’ll do right by you Little One.

  I wonder if Jane—wherever she ran to—is crying torrents of tears or is still too numb for it yet. I wonder if she feels the way I did the night Grand killed Ryan in front of me. Is her desolation just as black? Blacker? They’d been married for so many years.

  Maybe she didn’t actually see Kyle get shot. Maybe she’s still holding onto the barest thread of hope.

  Oh god. I don’t think I’ll ever sleep again.

  Gabe gives me a searching gaze when he thinks I’m not looking.

  “I’m fine!” I snap at him.

  “Maya, it’s alright to…”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine.”

  “Okay,” Gabe says quietly and pulls up another shovelful of earth. “You don’t have to…”

  “What?”

  “Be like Tarren. Please don’t be like him.” Gabe’s energy blooms with yellow, the color of daffodils. The color he reserves for Tammy, for his mother, for the father he never knew. The color of loss.

  This night needs to end. For some crazy reason, I become convinced that the sun won’t come up until Kyle is buried. I dig with a fury, like something possessed.

  Gabe calls me to stop, and I see that the grave is open before us.

  I tell him to back off, and maybe I’ve got a little of Tarren’s growls inside me somewhere, because Gabe nods and gets the hell out of my way. I open up the trunk and wrap the tarp around Kyle’s body, hiding that funny face forever. I take my time laying him in the grave, making sure he’s in a comfortable, respectable position.

  We’ll do right by you Little One.

  When I climb back out, Gabe picks up his shovel.

  I shake my head. “Let me do it.”

  “Fine,” he says. He’s standing out of the bright cut of our headlights, but I can still see his face, how worn he looks.

  I attack the pile of dirt we’ve amassed, throwing it down onto the shapeless form that was Kyle only a short time ago. When the grave is filled, I beat the earth down with the underside of my shovel. A small, discolored hump is the footprint of our work tonight.

  “Go ahead, do your thing,” Gabe says. He leans up against the Murano, shivering in his coat.

  I drop down on my knees next to the pile of upturned soil. The night is dark against my eyelids. You are a sheep in wolf’s clothing, Kyle’s ghost whispers from beneath the earth.

  For a long time I kneel, and the words don’t come; only this terrible, ringing silence. Gabe waits, but I can feel the impatient pulses of his energy. I press my hand into the sandy dirt and think, Rest in peace my friend. Forgive me for what I had to do.

  It’s terribly lame. Kyle deserves a better sendoff, but I’m out of time and out of words. I stand up and dust off my knees even though I’m still wearing my blood-splattered jeans. When I turn around, Gabe hands me a bottle of water.

  “Sit up front,” he says, and I just nod and follow him to the SUV.

  Chapter 19

  The sun finally rises on a new day. Tarren wants to continue watching the trailer, but Gabe convinces him that we all need rest. Our motel is only two miles away from the show, and Gabe can monitor the live feeds from the trailer in his room.

  “Plus, as long as she snags her purse, we can track her through the bug I put there,” he says.

  Tarren accepts this logic, mostly, I think, because he wants to question me about what I learned. When we get to the motel, I drain the last two rats in the bathroom, and then we set up a little Fox pow-wow.

  Slowly, clearly, without any dramatics to speak of, I recite my conversation with Kyle and Jane. I leave out all of Kyle’s silly grins, his “booga, wooga, uooga”, how Jane combed her fingers through the long grasses, and how she kissed the tip of Kyle’s nose to placate him. I also leave out my last question to Jane and her answer.

  The rest I give freely to my brothers. I watch as Tarren’s pen paints clean block letters into his notebook. He underlines something. Gabe hunches over his laptop, pulling up spreadsheets, adding notes in animated bursts, and clucking his tongue.

  Upon Tarren’s request, I repeat the story again. He stops and starts me, has me rewind and jump scenes while he fills pages in his notebook. The story feels far away, hollow, like it was someone else going through the motions, betraying the trust of her new friends.

  Tarren is interested in The Exalted, while Gabe asks me to slow down when Kyle and Jane discuss their strategy for ducking the angel radar. He gets a big kick out of the whole “Vigils” thing.

  “I like it,” he says. “We should adopt it, you know, like wear big Vs on our chests so when the angels see us, they know, that, like, their card is punched. It’s over. We need a signal too. A big V spotlight the Commissioner can use to contact us.” His enthusiasm is a little too forced. I can tell from his energy that he’s freaked. Part of it might be about The Exalted, but I think it’s mostly what Kyle said about angels needing to feed on human energy; how I’ll always be hungry without it.

  I don’t try to hide this part in my narrative, or couch it, or even offer up a peevish defense about how I’m different. I just say it straight out, using Kyle’s exact words. Tarren’s face does not reveal any concern, but, then again, it wouldn’t. Still, I know the wheels are turning fast in his brain, and all those doubts he has about me are taking even deeper root.

  When both boys are satisfied with my explanation, I excuse myself to the shower. Beneath the hiss of the scalding water, I can hear them talking quietly, reviewing this new data, and coming to terms with the consequences.

  Gabe’s voice jumps and then quickly hushes.

  For the first time in the known history of Maya, I don’t strain to overhear their conversation. I’m in no mood to handle a rehash of all Tarren’s doubts about me and Gabe’s stubborn defense. So, I sit down under the spray of burning water, pull my legs to my chest, and clasp my hands over my ears to mute out their voices.

  Protected within the veil of water, I wait for things to settle inside my head, or for this thick binding of guilt to ease just a little. There was something so enticing, so wonderfully simple about the lives that Kyle and Jane had chosen. I want to hate them, I want to despise them, I want to say yes to their offer and be part of a family who accepts me for exactly what I am.

  Instead, I stand up and turn off the water.

  ***

  When I exit the bathroom, my brothers both watch me carefully. Gabe’s aura is flickering up and down, splayed with irritated oranges from their argument. Tarren’s aura is on lockdown, which is a sign in itself.

  They’ve decided that we will all rest for three hours and then set up a rotating watch on the trailer. Tarren will start, and Gabe and I will relieve him.

  Tension hums between us, and the big, nasty truths of what we must eventually face about my hunger. We ignore them. The boys both look beat to hell. Pale faces. Scruffy jaws.

  Yawning, Gabe packs up his laptop and trudges to his room.

  I pretend to sleep, and Tarren sits on his bed, looking over his notes, scribbling more. I hear his pen pause every once in a while, and I wonder if he is glancing over at me, trying to figure out what to do. I imagine those seeds of doubt fermenting in his mind, shooting up into wild, abundant vines.

  Beneath my pillow, I clench my fists. Why does he even take all his notes in a fucking notebook anyway? That’s what computers are for.

  Eventually, Tarren closes his notebook, tucks it into his duffle bag, and lies down on his bed. When his restrained aura eases, and his breath slows and evens out, I slip from my bed and unlatch the window. I tried this once before, and Tarren caught me. That feels so long ago. Today, the window opens silently beneath my trained hands, and I slide out. Tarren doesn’t stir.

  I climb onto the motel roof and sit on the ledge with my legs dangling over. The afternoon sky is crowded with clouds that spit down a light rain. The wind turns it sideways, and it pecks at my face and at my skin beneath the thin cotton of my t-shirt.

  I don’t want to think about Kyle and Jane—our little monster family that might have been—so instead, my mind takes this “what might have been” theme and applies it to all the tar heavy secrets I’ve spent so much mental energy trying to hide in creative ways. Chains, caskets, concrete, bricked up walls, things like that.

  For instance, what could have been if Grand had never torn the secret of my existence from Tarren’s lips during the extended torture session that left Tammy dead and my brother with a network of scars sewn into his flesh?

  What could have been if Grand hadn’t left that baited laptop in his hotel room, tricking my brothers into thinking he was close to finding me? If he hadn’t followed them to my college when they tried to protect me? If my brothers hadn’t inadvertently led them to my innocent little world, to Ryan.

  It’s a secret I’ve kept from my brothers, am still keeping all by my lonesome so they won’t have to.

  Gabe and Tarren shadowed me, but not close enough. They’d unwittingly done their part, and Grand swooped in and snatched his prize. If Tarren hadn’t slipped a tracker in my purse, they would have never found me in time to launch their belated rescue. A rescue that didn’t save Ryan and, honestly, didn’t save much of me.

  I look up. The door to the roof opens. Tarren walks over, pauses as if he expects an invitation, then sits down beside me. Out of arm’s reach, of course.

  Tarren has a talent for annoying me even when he isn’t trying. Maybe it’s because he’s staring at me with that carefully cloaked face, and I can never tell what he’s thinking—if he despises me, pities me, or maybe something else.

  “What do you want?” I finally ask.

  Tarren doesn’t answer right away. This is another thing I can’t stand about him; how he always takes his time, auditioning his words like he’s got to be careful around me.

  “It wasn’t easy what you did yesterday.” Tarren pauses like I’m supposed to respond.

  “You did well,” he says after a while. “I should have told you that earlier.”

  “So I earned my angel-killing scout badge?”

  Tarren frowns. I know this is hard for him, playing nice, but he’s not the only one with an excuse to be moody.

  “I know that none of this has been easy for you,” he begins softly.

  “Quit it!” I snap at him. “I get enough slack from Gabe; I don’t need it from you.” I meet Tarren’s pale blue eyes, and I don’t back down. “I know that you don’t trust me, and maybe you shouldn’t. I get it. I’m a liability.”

  I wait for the famous Tarren scowl and those narrowed, penetrating eyes. Instead, he leans back on his hands and looks down at the motel entrance below us.

  I follow his gaze. A woman walks out of the lobby door rolling a big suitcase in one hand and dragging two bulging black trash bags with the other. Her blonde hair is pulled into a sloppy ponytail that reveals inches of dark roots, and her jacket rides up her waist as she swings the trash bags over her shoulder.

  The woman’s energy is muddy blue, lying almost static around her body like a sodden blanket. A little boy runs out around her. He seems to be all coat with little nub arms and legs sticking out and a round, dark head on top.

  “Dylan, no running!” the woman yells. “Brad, you coming?”

  “Uh-huh.” An older boy with glasses and freckles follows the woman out of the motel. He drags a second suitcase on wheels. It keeps flipping over, and I can tell from the kid’s dancing aura that he’s getting pissed. He kicks it back over. He might be eight or nine years old.

  The mother arranges her children and belongings. The boys go on a bench at the curb, and the luggage is lined up next to it. The children are told to sit still until she gets back with the car. They nod their heads vigorously, but as soon as the mother is gone, the older one stands up as if to prove his mettle.

  “Let’s wrestle,” he says to his younger brother.

  “Nah-ah, I don’t wanna.”

  “Yeah you do, come on.”

  A smile tugs at the corner of Tarren’s mouth but doesn’t stay long.

  “We used to gang up on Gabe when we were kids.” His voice is soft like he’s sharing a secret. “Tammy was worse, but I always played along.”

  This is the very first time I’ve ever heard Tarren say his twin sister’s name, and it causes his whole aura to recoil, like water thrown on a fire. A yellow-ginger hue pulses up from the center met by a pale, throbbing red. I know what red indicates — pain, suffering — but I still haven’t figured out what that apricot shade means.

  “Gabe was so easy to rile up,” Tarren continues. “He’d always follow us around, want to play with us. Mom would go out on her “trips”, and she’d expect us take care of him. So, we’d invent games and then change the rules so that Gabe always lost and had to endure whatever random punishment Tammy or I made up.” Tarren pauses, and that sad smile makes another short appearance. “We’d make him stand outside in the snow or hold his breath until he passed out or wear one of Tammy’s dresses. He’d scream and cry, and we would just laugh at him, because we always knew he’d come back wanting to play again in another hour.”

  Below, Dylan, the younger kid, scrambles up on the bench. “I’m Cena, and I’m gonna break your bones,” he calls out in his high little voice. “Yay!” he jumps and kicks in the air. He doesn’t land anywhere close to his brother.

  “That’s gay,” Brad says. “You gotta flip when you jump and try to land on top of me.” He takes off his big jacket. “Okay, okay, my turn now. You gotta stand there while I clothesline you.”

  “Tammy and I got fed up with always having to watch Gabe,” Tarren continues. “So, one day we invented this secret club in the basement, ‘The Truly Terrifying and Totally Terrific Ts’, and we didn’t let Gabe join. We locked the door and watched TV while he banged on it and screamed.”

  Tarren’s eyes are far away, so pale, they almost look colorless. The pain hasn’t left his aura, though it’s mellowed into more amber than red. “He got in though,” Tarren says. “Used a screwdriver to unscrew the doorknob.” Tarren pauses. “Gabe is really smart,” he tells me. “He doesn’t think so, but he is.”

  “I know,” I say.

  The little kid starts screaming, “Get off me! Get off me!”

  His brother is on top of him, pulling his arm back. Dylan’s energy is growing bright and streaking red.

  “You gotta tap out,” Brad tells him. Dylan just howls.

  An old station wagon pulls up to the curb. Their mother rolls down the window. “Brad, get off your brother!” she screams. She gets out of the car, and as soon as the door slams, Brad releases his grip, grabs his coat, and scrambles onto the bench.

  “What the hell do you think you were doing?” The woman keeps plodding toward him. Dylan lies in the grass holding his arm and wailing his lungs out. The red dissipates from his aura. The kid’s not really hurt, crafty little bastard, but his mother doesn’t know this. She scoops up her young son and bounces him on her hip.