After Tammy’s death, only Gabe continued the weekly trek to the grove. As far as he knew, Tarren never went near this place again.

  I push away these thoughts and concentrate on the present. This quiet feels so thick, so final, that it’s almost a shock when Tarren’s rough, shaking voice breaks it again.

  “There were so many nights when Mom was gone, or later, when Gabe and Tammy were out there with her hunting things in the dark,” he says. “You can’t know how often I lay in bed at night, staring at the ceiling and imaging what your life was like, all the things you had that I would never get. Like…like a school to go to every day. Friends. A father. I would picture you riding the bus to school, pedaling a bike that your parents bought you for your birthday, eating in a cafeteria, drawing chalk horses on the sidewalk with friends. Being normal and cherished.”

  Tarren rises to his feet. He sways but catches himself. He’s shivering, and blood is crusted all over the sleeves of his jacket.

  “I hated you,” Tarren says. “All those nights while we were risking everything for no reward and no recognition, you were somewhere far away, lovingly tucked into a big comfortable bed, dreaming big comfortable dreams.”

  He turns toward me. The purple twilight digs trenches into the premature lines of his forehead and around his mouth.

  “I hated that my mother loved you enough to spare you from the life we had to endure. So when we found Grand’s laptop, I considered that it might be a trap.” The shadows take all the color out of Tarren’s eyes. They look black. Empty. “But I figured after everything we’d been through, all the times we’d risked our lives, all the bodies we’d buried, that you owed us this one little assist.”

  His voice drops so low that even I have to strain to hear.

  “I never meant for Grand to take you. I thought you were safe on the campus, that he would never try something that brazen. We had tracked you for days, and there was no trace of him. I started to doubt that…it doesn’t change what happened. Only my intention wasn’t…No matter how I felt about you, I would have never sacrificed you like that. Never. You don’t know…can’t know how guilty…ashamed…after what he did. What you became.”

  I’m crouched behind a deep spray of needles, and I don’t think he can see me in the growing darkness. Instead, he just stares straight ahead, listing and shivering and drowning me in his sadness.

  I don’t know what to do, what to feel, what to say. When did breathing become so fucking hard?

  “Gabe trusted you. He loved you. That’s the way he was,” Tarren says at last. I finally notice the 9mm Glock in his hand. He must have taken it from the Murano’s glove compartment after leaving Dr. Lee’s cabin.

  “He couldn’t understand how dangerous you were. What you were.” Tarren tightens his grip on the gun. “He didn’t believe me.”

  “Tarren,” I whisper. I don’t know if he hears me.

  “I was weak. I wanted to believe too.”

  Before tonight, I always thought Tarren was the strongest of us. Odysseus. I believed that his granite façade hid a dearth of emotion, not the opposite. And now, when it’s almost too late, I finally understand what Gabe has always known. Why he always works so hard to make Tarren laugh.

  I remember Tarren’s begging eyes in the warehouse. Those tears. His aura pulsing like a supernova, Pouring out his love.

  Whatever I was feeling before, whatever animosity I’ve ever had toward Tarren is gone. I need to protect him.

  I need to save him.

  I jump out of the tree, land cat-soft in the grove, and rise up slowly so I don’t spook him.

  “I did what I had to do,” I tell him. I don’t sound brave or powerful or sure of myself. I just sound like me when I get scared and sobbish.

  “I told you to run, to never look back.” Tarren raises the gun, and I’m not sure which of us he’ll go for.

  “Gabe would never leave you behind, you know that. And neither would I.” My words surprise me, because they’re true. The gun hones in on my voice, but I continue speaking.

  “I’m sorry for the childhood you never had, for the mission you never wanted, for what happened to Tammy, for the pain you have carried for so long…”

  “Stop,” he growls.

  “But I’m here now. You are my family. You are my brother.”

  Tarren’s hand is shaking so much that I take a couple of steps toward him so he won’t miss if he decides to shoot me.

  “He trusted you,” Tarren says. “He loved you.”

  “Gabe isn’t dead.”

  “Thirty-two seconds,” Tarren whispers.

  “I’m not a full angel.”

  “Close enough. You didn’t get just one injection, did you?”

  We look at each other.

  “Two,” I say. “Two injections.”

  Tarren nods. “It’s my fault. I couldn’t get out of the cuffs fast enough. I didn’t protect him from you.” The shadows find his scar and fill it in black. “Why couldn’t I protect him?” He chokes on his next words. “Gabe was the only good thing left.”

  Whatever last vestiges of energy, desperation, insanity or combination thereof that was holding me up dissipates under the weight of Tarren’s words. My knees buckle.

  I give up.

  “Just kill me,” I say. I’m on the ground. As soon as the first tear falls I can’t stop. I weep like the world is ending and I’d better get all my tears out while I still have time.

  After a while, I look up, and Tarren is gone. Since I’m already fully committed to this breakdown, I just keep going. I crawl over to the graves, read the names, Canton Fox, Diana Fox, Tammy Fox, and I sob, and I sob. Will Gabe be next? Will we all end up here, little boxes of our possessions moldering in the ground?

  I lie on the cold earth gasping for breath and listening to the sounds of the forest. Then I cry again, but I am better now. Calmer.

  Gabe will make it through the night. I’ll make it through the night too. I’m pretty sure Tarren will hate me forever, but that isn’t anything new. I’ll deal with it. Our fucked up little family may be on the trembling edge of oblivion, but I will somehow pull us back. I’ll find a way to save Tarren. I’ll make things right.

  Chapter 34

  Gabe has exactly three freckles on this face. The most noticeable one is on his left cheek, just above the welt from the vicious slap I gave him. There’s another one on his forehead below his hairline, which is hard to see under his too-long bangs. The third freckle is on his left eyelid. This one is small and pale.

  These freckles become very important to me over the next days. I use them like stars to orient myself across the changing landscape of my brother’s face.

  Despite the high calorie paste that Dr. Lee pumps into Gabe’s stomach at regular intervals, my brother’s body consumes itself to replace the energy I stole. What little fat he had is stripped away, followed by the lean muscle he worked so hard to pack onto his long, thin frame.

  Those freckles anchor me as the legacy of my touch hollows out Gabe’s cheeks, erodes deep gullies in his neck, sinks his eyes into bruised caves, and turns his skin so translucent that I can see the blue, green, and purple roadways of his veins running below the surface. There is nothing left of him but an unsteady heartbeat.

  No blue.

  No Gabeness to speak of.

  ***

  On the first day, I commandeer a rickety office chair and wedge it in the corner of Gabe’s room, far enough so that the low levels of radiation my body emits can’t harm him. I plant myself into its lumpy, unwelcoming lap, latch my gaze onto those three freckles, and don’t let go.

  I incessantly call the extra cell phone that Gabe always keeps stashed in the glove compartment of his truck. The truck that was missing when I finally dragged myself home last night. Tarren didn’t take his duffle bag out of the SUV, nor any of the extra phones we have lying around the house. No note. No indication of when he would be back, hell, if he would be back.

  Each time I call, the phone goes directly to voicemail. What to say? Don’t off yourself, pretty please? Let’s go get therapy together? I’m sorry that I may have killed the last precious thing you had left in the world?

  I decide to go with, “Tarren, pick up the damn phone. Where are you?”

  In the afternoon, Gabe’s heart warbles once. Twice. I could hear it anyway, but the monitor announces it with astonishing volume followed by a long, uninterrupted cry as he flat lines. The funny thing—at least it’s funny to my crazy brain—is that nothing happens on the outside. Gabe doesn’t move or wince or groan dramatically. It’s just that one moment he’s here, and the next the machines tell me that he’s not.

  Francesca rushes into the room, probably because I’m hollering my head off. Dr. Lee limps after her. They get Gabe back in a few minutes, but his pulse is irregular. I’m afraid of the machine, of that high peal of noise it could emit again. So I get myself gone, just for a little while, to go and look for some courage.

  ***

  At home, I stand just inside the front door and try to think of something to do. Taking a shower is too hard. Cleaning all the clothes from our trip is out of the question. Actually, just taking a single step forward suddenly seems like an impossible feat of strength.

  I keep getting distracted as my memories intrude. Gabe’s screams echo from everywhere. His wobbly little voice, Why?

  My own sneering reply, Because I want you to understand. I want you to forgive me for killing you.

  My eyes land on the epic battle taking place between the random assortment of figurines on the shelf above Gabe’s computer monitors. I lurch toward it desperate to turn off my mind. Painstakingly, I unbend plastic arms raised in aggression. I denude clenched fists of broadswords, nun-chucks, machine guns, and clubs. I reattach heads, twist broken arms and legs back into place. I raise the dead to their feet or lean them up against the wall if they keep falling over. In this way, I slowly weave a truce between the fighters. They stand together, Carebear and Conan alike, little army men and Wolverine and the weird anime woman with the big tits. Factions are forgotten. They are brothers and sisters now. Peace reigns.

  ***

  Francesca tells me exactly what they don’t know. Like if Gabe will ever wake up; if he sustained any permanent brain damage; if he will be the person he was before. I hear the term “wait and see” from her mouth so many times that I actually have this weird dream—there’s a lot of other stuff going on, but this was a part of it—where Francesca is walking around with a parrot on her shoulder, and it keeps croaking “Wait and See!” “Wait and See!”

  Dr. Lee comes by every hour to check the compilation of numbers that Gabe has been reduced to. Occasionally, the old man sits with me for long stretches. His aura is dark with worry, though he keeps his face calm for my sake. We don’t speak.

  The only exception comes late that first night when Dr. Lee stands over Gabe, shakes his head, and says, “I don’t make it a habit to indulge in self-pity, but there are times when I wish that I’d been at the hospital that day the angels came for me.”

  I don’t know what to say back, so I pull my knees to my chest and clasp my arms around them. The mottled brown hues in his aura are darker, and I still don’t know what it indicates. An illness? Perhaps just the dregs of old age. I don’t ask.

  Dr. Lee turns around and gives me one of his penetrating stares. “When you lose almost everything, the little you have left becomes precious. It can be a burden to care about something or someone so much.”

  “Maybe the solution is to stop caring,” I murmur.

  A wry smile forms on Dr. Lee’s lips. “Give it a try and let me know how that works for you.”

  ***

  The oxygen tube and heating pads come off after the second day. The IV drip, feeding tube, and catheter remain. This is the day I notice something different about Gabe. It’s not so much that he’s got an aura again, but that the lines of his body are blurred, like there might just be the faintest hedge of light trying to push up from the surface of his skin. By the end of the day he’s got a grayish ring of smoke around him. An aura as thin and weak as a thread, but it’s there, and each hour it grows a little thicker, a little brighter.

  ***

  Francesca is an angel, but not the killing, super-powered, terrible kind. She’s the kind with wings, harp, and cloud row seating. She takes such good care of Gabe, sitting with us in the morning and at night after her classes. Her hands are so gentle, so careful with him. When she cleans him, massages his limbs, and does her other nursely things, I leave him in her care, sprinting the two miles home to shower, feed and water Sir Hopsalot, go Godzilla on the poor, shrinking population in the rat complex in the basement, and catch a couple hours of sleep.

  I only deviate from this routine once, riding Tammy’s motorcycle to Home Depot, making a purchase, and doing one quick home renovation.

  Francesca must be brimming from head to toe with questions, but she only ever asks one. It’s the second night that we’re sitting together in Gabe’s room. She closes her biology textbook, leaves the room, and returns with a pile of Gabe’s clothes, which she sets on the dresser.

  “You can take these home,” she says. I glance at the pile, which includes his blood-stained coat, scuffed sneakers, and the gun and knife hostlers he’d had buckled to his chest, waist, and legs. On top rests his lock pick kit missing two picks.

  “It was the license plates,” Francesca says in a small voice.

  “Huh?”

  “They changed their license plates every couple of weeks. That’s how I knew they were lying about being software salesmen.”

  We look at each other. Her energy is starting to get jumpy, which isn’t good at all, because I haven’t been feeding much.

  “There were other things too.”

  “Francesca.”

  “I asked Dr. Lee about it,” she presses on. “He showed me the closet, told me that Tarren or Gabe might get hurt one day. He said that what they do is very dangerous.”

  “That’s why you weren’t surprised when we showed up.”

  Francesca looks down at her hands. “He told me not to ask any questions. It would be better…safer.”

  “He was right.” I make a big show out of toying with the sleeve of my shirt while I try to think of something other than how tantalizingly close Francesca’s energy is to me, how velvety soft that blue looks, how blissful it was to drink from the human well.

  “Gabe is crazy about you,” I say for absolutely no reason.

  Francesca looks over toward the bed. “I know.”

  I stare at her aura, hoping for some rich purples that would signify complementary feelings. The colors shift around her, but they are pale lilac. Friendship. Worry. Not love.

  “But you’re attracted to Tarren.”

  Francesca ducks her head, sending a curtain of dark hair down across her face. “I uh…Tarren told you?”

  “He didn’t. I’m an observant person.”

  Francesca doesn’t look up. Dark, wine-colored hues whisper through her aura. “He is handsome and polite…and, and,” She fumbles for the word, but then it comes to her, “mysterious.”

  I could almost laugh. That he is, indeed.

  Francesca says in a breathy voice. “I…well, at least at first I was…yes, attracted to him.” She tucks her hair behind her ear. “Last year at school, there was a dance.”

  “And you asked Tarren?” I blurt out, incredulous.

  Francesca nods. “He said no. I mean, not directly, but he said he had other responsibilities, and he said something else.” She frowns, “…that he wasn’t good for me and neither was Gabe.”

  My first instinct is to refute, at least for Gabe’s sake, but I realize that I can’t. Gabe wants to protect Francesca as much as the rest of us; actually, more so. He’s unsuccessfully hidden his heart from her for years just for this reason.

  “I just want to know…” Francesca looks at me straight in the face. I admire her for that, especially because her hands are shaking and her aura is jumping up high. “You are criminals then?”

  “No.” I try and offer her a friendly smile, but my lips are about as flexible as iron rods. “It’s complicated and, well, difficult to believe. Francesca, just know that Tarren and Gabe are the good guys. They’re heroes. They save people.”

  “And what about you?”

  “I, uh…I’m kind of in the middle,” I tell her, though I know this doesn’t make any sense to her at all.

  There are a lot of reasons to hate Francesca. She’s beautiful. She’s kind. She’s never lied to me. In other words, she’s just about damned perfect, which makes messy, flawed, coward me feel just great about myself. But when I’m here, wobbling on this ridiculous high wire I’ve strung up, she doesn’t prod and doesn’t push. She lets me cross over in my artless way, and I owe her for it and for what she’s done for Gabe. I think I’ll even eventually forgive her for not loving him the way he deserves.

  “And you?” I ask into the long stretch of silence between us. “What are you doing all the way out here in the boonies? I mean, look at you, you’re gorgeous. You belong on magazine covers, or lounging by a pool wearing huge sunglasses and cradling a tiny fluffy dog.”

  Those butterfly lashes pump up and down, and heavy streaks of yellow crack through the smooth blue polish of her aura.

  “I was in a very bad place once,” Francesca says. “Dr. Lee helped me. I used to clean his house part-time, but when I had nowhere else to go, he offered to let me stay here. I…” More butterfly lashes, now with dew drops hanging off the ends.

  “What bad place were you in?”

  Francesca is quiet for a moment. Her hands come up and tug as a strand of her black hair. “I have my own secrets,” she whispers, and we leave it at that.