“Dammit. DAMMIT!” I choke out. I put both hands on the dashboard and press hard. All I know is that War is still alive. I had a chance to put him in the ground, and I missed. Again.

  Oh, and that we totally and utterly created the mother of all fuck storms. I really hope dead people don’t actually turn in their graves, because Diana might actually drill herself to the surface with this royal screw up.

  Tarren makes another sharp turn, and the back exit of the subdivision is in front of us. The police radio on the floor near my feet is crackling with voices. They’ve already got a road block at the main entrance. Two cars are on their way to block the back. A helicopter is moving into position.

  I am hyper-aware of everything. The way the streetlights wash over the jeep briefly lighting Tarren’s face. The tight set of his lips that pull the scar up. His long-lashed eyes, so focused. The deep crimson stains on his jeans.

  “You’re hurt!” I gasp.

  Tarren turns out of the subdivision, freeing us from the closing trap. The wind rushes through the shattered window. We race down the street, blasting past two stop signs and turning onto a thoroughfare. Tarren says nothing as we merge into traffic and slow. When we stop at a red light in a tight pack of cars, he looks down at his pants and then to me.

  Very calmly, he mutes his com before he says, “You’re hit.”

  “What?” I look at him and follow his eyes to the wet handprint that looks black as oil on the dashboard in front of me.

  Chapter 14

  The cars move forward, and we go with them. A fire engine streaks past on the other side of the road. My ears ache with the scream of its siren. Overhead, the sky fills with the whomp, whomp, whomp of a chopper.

  Seemingly in slow motion, I look around my body unable to process where the new burn of pain is coming from. Blood. I see lots of blood dampening my coat, stretching like willowy branches across my jeans, and smearing my hands. It changes color, from black, to brown, to startlingly red as oncoming headlights wash through our windshield.

  The glass on the floor from the broken window bounces and makes small chimes of sound as Tarren takes a sharp turn into a parking lot.

  I got hit, I think numbly, by a bullet. It’s somewhere inside of me.

  Somehow Tarren has managed to find a quiet parking lot in front of a hiking trail. The perfect hiding spot. Tarren can do magical things like this.

  “Out of the car.” Tarren is already stepping out on his side.

  “Cops are everywhere,” Gabe’s voice whispers in my ear. “I’m in some old couple’s attic. It’s hot as Satan’s colon up here.”

  Tarren unmutes his phone. “Check. Stay dark until they wrap up the searches and meet us at the rendezvous.” He mutes it again.

  “Alright,” Gabe replies. “This is bad.”

  “Check,” I murmur faintly.

  The door next to me opens.

  “Out,” Tarren says. His eyes are a simmering gray, the color of clouds right before they unleash lightning and thunder.

  As soon as I slide out, Tarren circles around me. “Right upper chest.” I notice faint colors piercing the cobalt blue of his aura. Its normally smooth edges are jumping, making it look ragged. This is big, those tiny little jumps in his aura, those pale oranges and whites, but I can’t think of why.

  Tarren studies me. “Is your com on? Turn it off.”

  Just at this moment, the thing, the bullet, becomes real, and the pain crashes over me like an immense wave. I stare at the passenger seat, at the pools of dark blood collecting along the seams. Tarren is saying something, but his words sound fuzzy like he’s got cotton balls in his mouth. The pain is a vortex, sucking in his voice, my thoughts, everything except the warm snake of wetness sliding down my arm, dripping off the tips of my fingers into the dirt. The dust eats my blood.

  “Did your mom ever bring you to the dentist when you were kids?” I ask Tarren. “Did you get your vaccines and your teeth cleaned? Where did she even get the money?”

  This is important. At first I don’t know why, but then I do. I need to make sure Diana was a good mother to them. That my brothers were loved. Taken care of.

  “Uh, what’s happening right now?” Gabe whispers.

  Tarren’s brow creases. He touches the screen on his phone. “Maya was hit,” he says matter-of-factly.

  “How bad?” Gabe’s voice is sharp.

  “Did she ever take you trick-or-treating when you were kids?” I ask.

  “Maya, I need to touch your arm.” Tarren’s voice is floating in front of his face. “Ready?”

  “How bad is it Tarren?” This is Gabe.

  Tarren’s aura approaches. I wobble a little. The pain is washing over me again and again, ceaseless waves. “And birthday parties. Did she throw you birthday parties? Did you have any friends? Did anyone know you existed?”

  Tarren’s fingers touch my arm. ENERGY, ENERGY. I snatch my arm away and turn my back to him.

  “Maya, I need to…”

  I grit my teeth and close my eyes. Tarren takes my arm. Maybe he’s trying to be gentle, but his touch raises a deep ache in my arm that seems to be coming from the center of the bone. And his aura. ENERGY. The pales shades within his aura are growing darker. My control is a fraying rope.

  “Did she take you to the dentist?” I gasp out.

  Tarren stands in front of me, and his deft fingers unbutton my coat. “Before our father died, he would take us trick-or-treating,” Tarren responds as he pulls the coat off my good arm. I groan, as he tugs it down my bad arm and drops it to the ground.

  “Well, my sister and I,” Tarren continues. “The first year he tried to bring Gabe with us, he kept taking his costume off. I think the bullet missed your lung.” I hear the snick of his pocketknife flip open and feel tugging against my sleeve as he cuts it open.

  “We stopped going after our father was killed,” Tarren says. His words are a whisper beneath the growing music of my hunger. “Our mother took us to the dentist every year. Dr. Lee paid for it.”

  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I realize that Tarren has actually acknowledged Tammy’s existence, a rare moment indeed.

  “She forgot sometimes,” Gabe says, his ghostly voice coming from the sky, “but Tarren would always remind her.”

  “It’s a through and through,” Tarren says. “Looks like the bullet hit some bone in back.”

  His aura. It’s too much. Too close. The instinct inside me is faster than my wavering awareness. I rip my arm from his grasp and tuck it into my body like a wounded animal. Tarren steps back, his eyes resting on my face. Tarren understands the hunger. The danger of it. Not like Gabe.

  Gabe!

  “Where’s Gabe?” I ask. A poisoned certainty settles over me. I killed him. All those months ago in Grand’s warehouse in Texas, I killed him, and everything else has been a fantasy.

  “Here,” Gabe says, but he’s not here. His voice echoes inside my mind like a ghost. I can’t feel his aura. If he were here, I’d feel his aura. “What’s going on? She sounds weird.”

  “She’s losing a lot of blood,” Tarren says. The lines of his body are dissolving into the throbbing color of his energy. Luscious energy. Energy that could make me strong. Powerful. Warm. I have to get warm.

  I stand up.

  “I just need…” I say, the words thick on my lips. I take a step forward.

  I don’t even see the gun, just hear the shot, feel the pain spike and fade in my left shoulder. I leap, a snarl coming from my throat. The energy moves fast, fast, fast, sliding out of the way as I land. My right arm buckles under my weight.

  “What the fuck is going on?” a voice yells in my head. “Was that Maya?”

  “I’ve got the situation under control.”

  I recover and run at the energy. It moves again. So fast. My legs and arms are slow, heavy. Hands grip me, wrenching my left wrist behind my back. A foot kicks into the back of my knee. I fall to my knees. A heavy weight presses me down.

  ENERGY. Everywhere. Cloaking me.

  Both of my wrists are clamped behind me. I wrench against the hold snarling as spit runs down my chin. I buck and push against the weight, desperate to rise. ENERGY, ENERGY. I need it!

  My toes scrabble against the ground for perch, but the music is fading. My arms feel heavier and heavier. My movements slow, my growls turning into slurring grunts.

  A voice screams in my ear, but the words have no meaning. “Don’t you fucking hurt her, Tarren!”

  My head is too heavy to hold up and drops to my chest. Far away, I feel the hands release my wrists. I would fall, but strong arms catch me. I want to say that I’m sorry. For what? I don’t remember, and I don’t think I get the words out anyway before darkness comes.

  Chapter 15

  The journey toward consciousness is a slow crawl through murky water toward a slipshod shore. I feel the energy close.

  Living.

  Throbbing.

  Beckoning to me.

  I reach for it over and over, stretching out my fingertips just to graze it. Almost there. Then it backs away like a teasing sprite.

  A single dream wraps itself around my brain. Rain is still missing. Where is he? Salt Lake City? Oakland? Knoxville? We’ve been to all these cities, walked all these streets, crashed in cheap motel rooms, and buried bodies. I forget who’s on the search team and start assigning old acquaintances and celebrities to the search. Johnny Depp and Leonardo DeCaprio are on my search team, naturally. Tarren gets my adopted mother, Karen because their names rhyme and that is somehow significant. He also gets Michael Wilkens, the guy I had the hugest crush on in fifth grade. Gabe gets my old college roommate, Lucy, because I think they’d get along great, and Natalie Portman who has made the poor decision to show up in her tutu and ballet shoes directly from Black Swan.

  As we search, the background shifts behind us from sand to tall pine trees to unforgiving granite cliffs. And it comes to me suddenly. I know where Rain is. Ryan has taken him. My murdered ex-boyfriend was jealous. His skeletal hands have plunged up through the wet, glistening soil and dragged Rain down into his coffin to suffocate.

  Energy lights up the sky, licking at my consciousness, blowing away the scene before it reforms and I have to start all over again. Something new is also rising to the surface. A deep, dull throbbing, like a drum inside my body.

  Over time, the pain localizes, shrinking until the drum is inside my right shoulder.

  I remember the gun shot. My eyes inch open. They feel unwieldy, my eyelids, like they could just slip closed at any moment. Skeletal hands still reach out in the back of my mind as I take in a pocked, dingy ceiling and breathe in strident scents of rubbing alcohol. I turn my face and feel a pillow beneath my head.

  Energy. The feel of it is so familiar that I intuitively know who it is even before his name forms in my sluggish mind. For a minute I just watch his energy, the heavy oranges that pierce the blue. Then I blink and study the figure within. He kneels on the floor near the foot of my bed. At first I think he is praying, but this is wrong. Tarren doesn’t pray. Faith is hope, and hope is too dangerous. His hands are moving, picking something out of the carpet. Pieces of something.

  I try to rise, but my arms are unwieldy, and pain washes through me like millions of tiny spikes running through each vein. I can see now that my wrists are tightly cinched together by five plastic ties and rest on my stomach, like I am carrying an invisible bouquet.

  Five. Five plastic ties. Tarren and I tested this out last year. I was able to break through three ties around my wrists. The magic number to bind me should have been four, but of course Tarren would use five.

  “You tranqed me,” I mumble, still trying to keep my lids up.

  Every drum beat of pain seems to rattle my thoughts into smoke.

  Tarren’s energy changes, calming down into a smooth shell of dark blue, all those oranges swept away into that big, impenetrable vault he keeps inside himself. He moves. I follow the feel of his energy as he approaches. A hand touches my back, and my body tenses like stone. That energy. He props me up, quickly removing his hand when I’m situated. An open water bottle hovers in front of my face, wrapped by his long fingers.

  “Slow,” he says.

  I am thirsty. Suddenly so thirsty, like I haven’t had a drink in years, like my whole body is made of sand. I grab the bottle between my hands so hard that it gushes water into my lap, but then I have my lips around the edge and gulp it down in quick, heavy slugs.

  When I’m done, I feel something else in the room. Fainter throbs of energy. I understand. “Give them to me.” The words are more a growl than I meant, but my body is desperate. The monster is close to the surface, and despite the pain, my muscles tense.

  Tarren nods and walks across the room. When he returns with a small box in his hands, my hands are straining against the ties, and I’m panting.

  “Hold your hands out,” he says.

  His words barely make sense. I have to translate them through the veil of hunger. I turn my hands up and hold them out, noticing that the glove is missing on my left hand. The skin has peeled back from my palm, and the feeding bulb is out, throbbing with heat and light.

  Tarren opens the cardboard box and pulls out a white rat by its tail. He drops it into my palms and steps back. Whatever else he does is lost. I wrap my fingers around the squealing creature, and the bulb of my left hand latches instinctively onto its aura. Ahhhhhhhh. Its energy streams through me like a salve. The heavy drumbeat of pain softens, and my body is rigid with a pleasure that is over all too soon.

  “More,” I gasp out, dropping the limp rat into my lap and holding out my hands again. My body vibrates with need. Tarren’s energy is so big, so beautiful. So much better than the second rat he dangles above my palms. I wish…I want….the second rat drops, and my thoughts blow away again, and more energy pours into me.

  When four cold rat corpses litter my lap, Tarren sets the empty cardboard box on a small table in the corner of the room and studies me. I shiver as the monster part of me screams for more, more, MORE! But I also feel my thoughts starting to cohere, the Maya part of me creeping out of the fog of drugs and pain.

  After a time, maybe just a minute or a whole handful of them, Tarren steps back up to the bed. He offers me a second water bottle and picks the dead rats from my lap. Only when I lower the second weightless bottle do I realize that my shirt is gone, and I’m showing off the blotchy pink sports bra that Gabe sabotaged at the laundromat with his crimson Flash t-shirt. My chest and left shoulder are both swathed in white tape. In a fit of panic, I rip the sheets off my lap and see that my blood-splattered pants are still on. Even my black sneakers. Thank you Jesus. I don’t know if I could ever look Tarren in the eye again knowing he’d seen my white, butterfly print panties.

  “The bullet went into your back, through the scapula. Missed your lungs,” my brother says. His eyes and face are intense. “You were lucky it was a 9 millimeter. If you’d been hit with a 45, you would have bled out.

  “Are you okay?” I blurt, remembering all those dreams of reaching for energy, his energy, again and again. “Did I hurt you?”

  “I’m fine,” Tarren responds. His aura is a steely blue, held under rigid control.

  That’s all he’s going to say about that, the sloppy fight, the five plastic ties that were evidently necessary during the surgery, and whatever I might have said or done in my drugged state.

  “You fixed me up?” My voice is slow and uncertain, my thoughts still moving slow. Before Tarren can respond, a new thought hits me. “Where’s Gabe?” I look around the small, drab room as if he could somehow be here without me feeling his energy.

  “Still hiding. We’re in contact.” Tarren says.

  I think this must mean I’ve only been out for a few hours, but when I look at the surprisingly beautiful and delicate clock on the nightstand and struggle to do the calculation, I realize that almost half a day has passed. I swing my head back to Tarren, and my fingers press into the sides of the water bottle in my lap, filling the room with the heavy noise of buckling plastic.

  “Still hiding?”

  Tarren wears his calm mask, the one that can hide almost anything. I’m pretty sure he would stare down an oncoming nuclear shockwave with this same expression.

  “The first responders picked up three bodies,” he says. “The entire neighborhood is locked down.”

  ***

  It actually gets worse. Tarren flips on the local news. The ancient, boxy television takes a few moments to warm up, and then there it is, the headline story of the day. A grave, jowly male reporter sits next to a tight-faced woman who looks like she’s fighting forty with every weapon modern cosmetic surgery has to offer. Big text blares, BREAKING NEWS! THREE DEAD CONFIRMED. The screen flips to a young female reporter wearing a heavy coat that doesn’t seem necessary for the mild temperatures. She stands in front of a long strip of police tape. The colors from a nearby police car wash over her as she speaks gravely into the microphone. I have trouble following the fast staccato of her words.

  “At least three fatalities,” she says. Other phrases resonate. “Enraged gang. Designer drugs. Strange lights.”

  “They have a video,” Tarren says, standing next to the bed. As if waiting for his cue, the screen flips back to Jowly who grumbles a few lines and a warning about the graphic nature of the clip to come. A jerky video splashes on the screen, obviously taken on a cell phone with shaky hands. I see a pair of shoes.

  “Frank, don’t! They have guns,” a female voice shouts from behind the screen. The video sweeps up toward a window. The faint light spilling out of the window does little to pierce the darkness. Frank is a lurking shadow with his baseball bat. And then I make my appearance, a dark streak with streaming hair, ducking beneath the swing of Frank’s bat. And then I’m gone.

  “She didn’t get my face. Did she get my face?” I look to Tarren in desperation.

  My brother stares expressionless at the screen. I look back. My pack of trailing angels are descending.