She pulls the curtain of her hair back behind her ear and tilts her head down, an uncharacteristically submissive move. “Is it only the promise?” she whispers.

  Is this more teasing, another trap, or is she truly revealing vulnerability?

  “Yes,” I say and move the empty glass into the sink.

  “Good,” she says, that smile arching back. “I like knowing that you’re here against your will.”

  I brace my hands against the counter. “Not against my will.” It’s important that she understands this. “You aren’t keeping me here.”

  “Just your pesky integrity,” she says rolling her eyes. “Well, we all have flaws.”

  It’s never been about integrity, but I suppose responsibility can be mistaken for integrity by someone who has precious little of either. Why didn’t I kill her? That question is so old that it seems to be a part of me.

  “I bought you some decent clothes.” Danielle beckons out of the open kitchen. Several large bags sit on her red leather couches. The top bag is stamped with a Ralph Lauren logo. “After you fill back out, we can get them tailored.”

  “I won’t wear your clothes,” I say.

  Her brown eyes spark with excitement. I know that I’m playing right into her game by fighting back, insisting on an honor that we both know is nothing but vapors.

  “You’re already wearing clothes I bought,” she says, nodding to my damp running outfit.

  “I’ll keep what I picked out on the trip here and pay you back for it as soon as I can,” I inform her.

  “But that stuff was from Target, and it was only a couple of things,” she pouts. “I bought you nice clothes.”

  “I don’t want anything from you.”

  “Oh yes you do.” She takes a step toward me, the bodice expanding and compressing with each breath.

  I do. I pull her into my body and press a hard, angry kiss on her mouth. It’s a sudden, violent movement calculated to throw her off balance, test her willpower to hold back. She could easily lose control, open her palms, and drain whatever’s left out of me.

  She pulls back, gasping, and delivers a stinging slap. “Don’t fucking do that, Tarren!”

  I know that she’s remembering back to that drizzly morning three years ago when I’d dragged myself onto her porch wanting to die. Maya had drained Gabe, and I wasn’t strong enough to kill her or myself. Danielle had let me in, and I’d kissed her, hard and desperate just like this. Though on that night, I’d let my emotions loose to wrap around us, pushing her to lose control with everything that I had. Somehow she’d resisted long enough to fling me across the room.

  My cheek is hot from her strike, and I bend down again, dominating her with the height and presence of my body. This time, her mouth opens to mine. As soon as it does, I slide my lips away and suck hard along her neck. She nuzzles my chin, trying to capture my lips, but I don’t allow it. I lift her up onto the counter and tear through the delicate ribbons of her bodice. I tear it away, unleashing her large, soft breasts.

  When she bends down to kiss me, I grab her hair and pull her head back. She hisses in pain but doesn’t try to stop me. This is our game. Her wanting, my denying. I bite around her breasts, my left hand clamped in her hair. My right hand loosely grips her arm, the fingers hardly bending.

  Danielle can stop me whenever she pleases, tear out of my grip with her superior strength, but she has never tried, always accepting with pleasure as much roughness as I care to give. And whenever she tries to give soft kisses and gentle strokes, my actions become meaner, rougher.

  Her hands go to my shirt, intent on pulling it up. I grab her wrists and slam them down on the counter, daring her to lose just a tiny speck of control, let those palms peel open. She gives in, holding herself back, allowing me to dominate.

  By the end, we are sprawled on the kitchen floor. Her clothes lay in torn disarray around us, though her stilettos are still strapped onto her feet. My clothes are fully intact. Her black hair fans out across the stone tile. Her breasts are a riot of hickeys and bite marks, and I see the pale bruising of fingerprints already fading from her chin, arms, and hips.

  “I should have killed you,” I whisper to her.

  “I should have killed you first,” she replies and licks my chin.

  She’s right. Six years ago in an alley in Vegas, she drained me, and I’d thought I was going to die. I wanted it. Danielle let me live, but she never let me go. She’d waited, watched Gabe collect me, and followed us to our motel. Why? I’ve wondered so many times why she let me live, why I fascinated her enough to tease and threaten. She kept waiting. Gabe tells me that I slept for a full day and then half of the next. What was she thinking all of that time? Why not just kill us both?

  Instead, she’d schemed, and when I woke up, the cryptic message was already waiting on my phone. It led me to a much nicer room in a much nicer hotel, right back to her – tight skirt and not-so-subtle threats. Exposure, the cleavage peeking out of her blouse, and her teasing hints that a select group of her friends would pay dearly for the information she knew. I could have called her bluff, but there was Gabe. She’d seen his face too, and our car. Who had she told? Had she taken pictures and hidden them somewhere?

  But you kept coming back to her, I remind myself. Was it all really to keep Gabe safe, or was it merely lust? Maybe it helped that she promised to stop killing drug dealers after I finally gave in and took her in a savage, humiliated wave of lust.

  It would be too easy to blame everything on the betrayal of my body, but I know the truth. It wasn’t for Gabe’s safety, either. We could have switched out the car, and what good would it have done her to know our faces when we could have initiated STYX protocol and disappeared into one of the forgotten nooks and crannies of this vast country.

  I glance at Danielle’s hands, the faint glow throbbing just beneath the surface of the pale skin of her palms. It was the risk. The potential for permanent oblivion that kept drawing me back to her, to those hands. Tammy had only been dead a year when I stepped into that Vegas alley and felt Danielle pull the energy from my body. I’d known what it meant – that I was finally free of the memory of Tammy’s fear, the quiver in her voice when she begged for death, the feel of the knife slipping so easily between her ribs.

  It’d been such a relief, that promise of a sleep without nightmares. It was a promise Danielle broke, a promise I’ve been trying to extract from her ever since.

  “Your eyes are so far away,” Danielle murmurs underneath me.

  I roll off her sprawled form, tucking myself back into my pants. Her hand reaches for me, but I ignore it and stand up. My body is exhausted, my quads and hamstrings twitching with fatigue. It’ll be everything I can do to force myself into a shower before collapsing into bed, but I keep my shoulders straight. My voice steady.

  “One day you’ll lose control,” I say, not looking back at her.

  “I won’t,” she whispers in languid pleasure. “I would never let you off that easy.”

  Chapter 38 – Maya

  Several minutes after my knock, the large front door to the mansion swings open, and Lo blocks the entrance with his body and his agitated aura. It has been less than a month since I’ve seen him last, but he seems taller. Perhaps I am smaller.

  He stares at me with hard eyes. Wounded reds flicker in his aura. He speaks, the deep baritone always a surprise. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  I wasn’t expecting the question so soon. My defenses are down, and the pain soars true, sliding right between my ribs. I nod mutely. The crimson hues crest through his aura, but his face is still. It makes me think that he’s had a lot of practice hiding his pain.

  “I thought so,” he says, voice flat. “I kept texting and he never answered.” The sun glints off the silver hoops twisting through the flesh of his eyebrows, nose, and lips, and the stud in his chin. “What about Gabe?”

  Mostly dead, I think. “He isn’t taking it well,” I say out loud. I wonder briefly if he’s even noticed I’m gone yet. He’ll realize it the next time he needs to make a booze run and the Mustang isn’t in the driveway.

  Lo shrugs at that. We stare at each other. I wonder what he’s looking for as his eyes move up and down my frame. Finally, without a word, he turns and walks into the dim interior of the house. I follow, closing the door behind me.

  “Not much of a hiding place is it?” I say, looking around the cavernous and empty rooms of the big house. “You ran all of 1,000 feet away.” I could actually see the gate of his original mansion up on the hill when I pulled into this long driveway.

  “First,” Lo holds up a long finger, “I don’t run. I retreat strategically. Second, this is the perfect place. What squad of angel dragoons is going to guess I’m just four houses over?”

  I think through this logic and it makes a weird sort of sense. In the living room, a single brown couch sits on the naked wooden floor in front of a huge flat screen television hanging on the wall. A thin girl with black hair and eyes racooned in makeup lounges on the couch. She looks up from her book to watch us walk across the room.

  “Who’s that?” she questions.

  “No one,” Lo replies.

  I arch an eyebrow at him. He blinks at me, stops.

  “This is Jade, my soul-sucking girlfriend,” he says waving a hand at the girl on the couch. The strands of rich lavender that seed through his aura betray his true feelings. He likes her. Maybe loves her. I bet it terrifies him.

  She gives him the middle finger.

  “Jade, this is Buffy, a secret vigilante who comes to me for my amazing intellect. I’m her Lucius Fox.”

  Jade props her chin on the arm of the couch. “The sidekicks always die,” she says. “You need to get out of that gig, fast.”

  “Actually, I’m his parole officer,” I say and then turn to look at Lo. “No more urinating in public, I hope?”

  “World smells like piss anyway,” Lo says. His face is so serious.

  Jade cracks a short smile. I wonder what her real name is. Probably the plainest, boringest thing in the world, like Jennifer or Hannah. Lo begins walking again, and I assume this is my cue to follow.

  “Bye,” I say to Jade. She lifts a hand, but her eyes don’t stray from the page of her book.

  “She’s cute,” I say to Lo as we climb the stairs.

  “Rabid squirrels are cute too, from a distance,” he replies.

  “You push her away, don’t you?” I say. “And she thinks it’s a game right now, probably likes it, but she’s going to realize one day…“

  Lo whirls around, aura arcing high off his body, strong enough that I take a step toward him without noticing.

  Whatever he is about to say, the thing flowing on the red tides of anger in his aura, dies on his lips, and he goes for the characteristic cruel jab instead. “Least I don’t have to worry ‘bout draining her dry every time we fuck. Can’t imagine what your sex life is like.”

  It says something about the heavy shroud of my apathy that this only stings a little. I see Rain’s face in my mind and gently push it away. Lo’s long strides eat up the stairs, and I follow him to the top into an empty hallway.

  “Where’s your mom?” I ask.

  “Stepmom,” he corrects automatically. “Cancun. Getting some more fat sucked out of her. I’m sure this time she’ll finally learn to love herself.” The reds haven’t left his aura, not since he opened the door, saw the expression on my face. I wonder if this helps, his sneering sarcasm at life. Does it protect him like Gabe’s humor, like Tarren’s discipline, like Chain’s anger?

  Tarren. Another stab of pain.

  No sense in delaying any longer. Lo and I have always been wary acquaintances, both appreciating the potential and danger of the other. We won’t become friends now, so I might as well get what I came for and leave.

  “Tell me about the Cure,” I say.

  “Buy me dinner first,” he responds with no enthusiasm. I watch him walk down the hallway, shoulder blades jutting from beneath his black t-shirt. He’s seventeen now, I realize. Almost out of the awkward stage. His body is mostly done stretching to its final dimensions, but he isn’t comfortable yet with his long, dangling limbs. I imagine him filling out over the next years, growing easy with his height and strength and presence. He’ll be big and solid one day, like his father. And the temper’s there too, naked and horrible in his aura, but he already knows how to control it, convert it into nasty humor or exhaustive research jaunts.

  Maybe he’ll be okay.

  Lo nudges open a door with his foot. Despite the many times I’ve been in his lab, a part of me still expects glass beakers bubbling over Bunsen burners filled with eerily glowing liquids. Instead, I walk into a guest bedroom filled with folding tables. Heavy machinery sits on the tables, plugs jammed into surge protectors. A single PC and a tablet glow from a small desk in the corner. I glance at a pad of paper teetering on the edge of the desk filled with chicken scratch notes and skull and crossbones sketches.

  Most of the machinery in Lo’s proper lab back at his mansion up the street isn’t here, including the terrible CT Scan.

  “Tell me,” I say simply, closing the door behind me. Why did Gem think the Cure is our only hope?

  Lo looks at me for a long, long time, dark eyes blinking, aura rippling. He leans back against one of the tables, knocking it softly with his knuckle. Finally he says, “It really was a cure, in the beginning. That was the goal. Tarren’s goal.”

  “But?” I prod.

  A small smile quirks on Lo’s face. His smiles are never good things. “When you were injected with the bone marrow of an angel, it changed every single part of you from your fingernails to your short and curlys. Seeped all the way into your cells, scrambled the bonds of your DNA.”

  “So you can’t change me back?”

  That mean smile grows. “It might be possible in a few more decades. CRISPR’s coming along. Fascinating stuff. But within our timeline? Hell no.”

  He dashes my most secret, vulnerable hope with an easy shrug, but I was prepared. It hardly hurts at all.

  “So, the Cure became something else,” Lo continues. He walks over and flops into the chair in front of the desk. “Me with all my brains, I figured something out.” He puts a finger to his head and waits for me to play my part.

  I say my line. “What did you figure out?”

  “That it’s much, much easier to figure out how to kill things than to reverse genetically engineer them.”

  I’m already nodding, because this isn’t a surprise at all. “The Cure is a weapon.”

  “A virus. Something that bonds to those unique markers in your DNA and tears them apart. Tarren was resistant at first. He didn’t want to go down that path. Probably because of you. But eventually he…he…”

  It happens quickly. I see it in Lo’s aura first, the sudden, intense deepening of the red hues, and then the tears collecting at the corners of his eyes. He whips the chair around to face away from me. I stand there stupidly, watching his sharp shoulder blades shudder as he hunches forward.

  He was doing so well, I think with true sorrow as I watch the devastation turn even the outer reaches of his aura red. Lo fights angrily against his sobs, trying to keep them in. I wish he wouldn’t feel embarrassed. He just lost the only friend he ever had. You can cry about that, I think silently to him.

  Lo would’ve been only 13 when Tarren and Gabe saved him moments before his father was going to turn him into an angel. At that age, Tarren would have looked impossibly tall and strong, and probably brave too, with that scar along his jaw. And even though Lo was a genius, he was still a boy; an angry, hurt, abused boy.

  I think back to all my interactions with Lo, the way his aura glowed with secret happy blues when Tarren gave him a nod. They spent so many hours together in the lab working on this, the Cure, the virus. More than once, Tarren carried Lo out of the lab, the boy’s face slack with exhausted sleep. I’d helped Tarren put him to bed those times. I remember pulling back his musky, teen-smelling sheets while Tarren laid him down carefully. I’d begged my brother to let me pluck out all of Lo’s facial piercings. Tarren had only flicked out the lights and motioned me out of the room, now filled with Lo’s heavy, slow breaths.

  Lo’s breaths are ragged now, and he’s laughing through his tears. I watch his big hands come up and wipe furiously at his eyes. “We were so close.”

  Another sob hits him, and his sides expand and contract with his shuddering breaths. Lo’s aura is red on red on red. My hands curl into tight fists, and I slowly back away from him as far as I can. My shoulders press into the wall.

  “He was so insistent…” Lo manages through his sobs. “We had to create an antidote before we released his.” His gaze lands on me hard, and his voice is bitter. “For you.”

  In a moment of strange clarity, I finally understand why Lo hates Gabe so much. I can almost hear the hidden thoughts in Lo’s furious heart. Why should sloppy, silly Gabe get Tarren as a brother? And then me, a ticking time bomb of a sister. No wonder he could only give me crude come-ons and cutting wit.

  “We don’t need an antidote,” I say.

  “He came up with a solution….for you…of course he would.” That laugh again. “And we were only weeks away. Weeks away.”

  And that’s all Lo says for a long, long time, because he loses his fight against his sorrow. It consumes him. I look away from his frantic aura, but I can’t block out the sound of his sobs. I push my mind to work even in the face of his terrible, arcing aura. Weeks. He said weeks away. When was that? The last time we were here? That would have been a little over two weeks ago. Which means…

  Finally, after a long stack of jagged minutes has passed, the tears are finished. Lo’s head is in his arms, body quaking with hiccups and sniffles. He won’t forgive me for witnessing his weakness, but I don’t need his forgiveness. All I need is the Cure.

  “Is it ready?” I ask.

  He turns, levelling puffy, accusing eyes at me. “I found a carrier. Compound 731. Resilient. Airborne. Holds the virus perfectly. If it were up to Tarren we’d spend another year testing it.”