Then Rain climbs up the stairs. I don’t turn, but I feel his breath on my neck. His warm hand find its natural place on my hip.

  “Are you sure?” he asks. “Really, really, double sure?”

  “Are you afraid yet?” I ask.

  Without answering, he moves from behind me and opens the last door in the hallway and waits. I take a small, fluttering breath and go in.

  ***

  I try not to think about how my ribs must stick out from beneath my skin as I hold up my arms and let him gently tug my t-shirt off of me, or how the cups of my bra sag open, only half filled with my flattened breasts. I am so nervous, so embarrassed, but when I look into Rain’s aura, I see the reflection of my own discomfort and uncertainty. And love. I see his love, and it makes me brave.

  I am surprised at how well my body remembers, even after so many years of chastity. Maybe it’s because this joining is an ancient thing, silent songs sung within our DNA. I don’t need to think, just to touch, to feel, to lay my kisses over every inch of his body. His skin is hot against mine, and his hungry mouth catches my lips, then the side of my jaw, my neck, and my stiff nipples. Our hands explore each other, and my eyes memorize new parts of him. He doesn’t explain the thick wad of gauze taped to his thigh, and I don’t ask.

  His aura flares around me, soaking us both in the deep purple colors of his lust. The tension between my hunger and my desire blends together so that it is one singular need beating through me, and I don’t know whether to throw my head back and scream or to clamp my teeth over my lip and try to hold it all in. The skin tightens across my palms, the feeding bulbs pushing painfully upward, trying to break through, but I don’t let them.

  My skin is so sensitive beneath his mouth, his panting breaths, his tongue. And we go so achingly slow, until finally I can’t stand it and grab his ass and pull him into me. We rock together, and I ride through the waves of pleasure and pain. I always, always, always keep watch on my monster, never fully letting go. And this is the way it has to be. Not some graceful dance like in the romance books. Not a rush of perfectly synced orgasms. We bump and grind along. An elbow accidentally hits a knee cap. We make weird faces and odd little grunts and groans. Our wet skin slides and squeaks against its match.

  But it is good, and we forgive each other the funny faces and the awkward elbow. Afterward, I lay on his chest, and we laugh together. I kiss his breastbone, feel myself rise with his fast breathing. He wraps his arms around me, hot and damp, his heavy brown eyes shining. This is the best part.

  The sweat dries, and my control grows more strained, but I let him keep his arms locked around me, his hips pressed against my back, our legs tangled. I have made him happy. I know it by the slow, sated swirl of his aura, by the solid colors that replace the usual frantic dance of hues.

  “How are you, Maya? Really?” he asks and places a warm kiss on my shoulder.

  “Bad,” I whisper.

  I feel his head move, the scrape of his sandpaper jaw against the sensitive skin along the back of my neck. “You can’t be the same person you were after someone you love dies,” he says. “My life is divided. There’s when Sunshine was alive and when she was dead.”

  “And never the twain shall meet,” I respond. It’s like that with me, too. Ryan died the same day I was turned into a hybrid angel, so those events together are the huge crack in my life that turned me into two separate people. And now Tarren’s death has cracked my life again. This time it is worse, so much worse. Grand took Ryan and my humanity. I could hate him, hunt him, kill him – and I did. But I am the one who killed Tarren, who tore Gabe’s heart out of his chest. I am the monster that I must hunt and destroy.

  “When they finally found her, well her body,” Rain corrects himself, “I was actually relieved.” He pauses. I listen to his breath, feel the story through the wordless spikes in his aura. “I never told anyone that,” he says. “They’d all think it was horrible, but…I already knew she was dead. That first night she didn’t come back after her run I knew it. All the searches, the prayer vigils, all that fucking, terrible hope, it was awful.”

  Rain doesn’t curse often, not the full-on curse words that they bleep on cable TV. I turn in his arms and look up at him.

  “When they found her body, my mom went into a total meltdown. Screaming on the floor. And all I could think was, Thank God. No more prayer vigils. I wanted them to have the funeral and just get it over with. I wanted all those nice ladies from her school to stop holding my hand and giving me hugs so that I could go and find out what happened to Sunshine, so that I could get revenge.”

  “My parents searched for me, for a long time,” I say, “after Grand changed me, and Tarren and Gabe took me to live with them. Tarren said it would be too dangerous to contact my parents, and I never did. They still don’t know what happened. And they…” I suck in my breath. This is an old memory, but still painful. “They had one of those press conferences where they ask the kidnapper to let me go. And my father, Henry, he was wearing a shirt with my face on it.” I tuck my chin down. “That wasn’t like him. Henry didn’t wear stupid t-shirts. He liked polo shirts and Dockers, and we didn’t even really talk much that last year after I went to college. Sometimes I didn’t even think he really loved me.”

  Rain’s fingers make small circles on my arm. “But he wore the t-shirt. He loved you.”

  “I was so selfish back then, but he wore the t-shirt, and they’ll never, ever know what happened to me.”

  Rain moves his hips, and I open up my legs, tip my head back, and receive his deep, consuming kiss.

  ***

  After the last heavy thrust of his hips, the last lazy stroll of my tongue up his side, which makes him tense with ticklishness, we are silent. No more murmured memories. No more sad hauntings to pull us away from this hazy happiness.

  I want to stay right here in this moment, not just in his arms, but in this pleasant distractedness forever. But the monster is getting stronger, probing. My palms are sore with the need, and all my waking nightmares are crowding back in: that room with the slanted roof; War’s piggy eyes; the stain of Gem’s blood on the floor; Gabe’s destructive drunkenness; and finally, the massive batch of Compound 731 being cooked up in a bribable Mexican lab right at this very moment. Death is coming, and it punctures my tiny cloud of happiness.

  At least I have dashed Rain’s thousand worries away. He gives me drowsy kisses for half an hour, and then I feel his aura shifting, turning soft and slow, and his breath soon follows as his grip around me loosens.

  I pull myself carefully from his arms, untangling my legs from his. His hair is in such delightful disarray. I love the long lines of him, the grace of his limbs, though he somehow manages so little gracefulness with them. And everything about him is perfect, from his thick dark eyebrows, to the springy hairs on his chest, and the mole on his side that is so ticklish. And him. He himself is perfect. I kiss the hand that still rests nearest to me, a soft butterfly kiss that won’t wake him.

  “You should have been afraid,” I say, though I’m so glad that he wasn’t.

  I put on my clothes, cinch my belt, and then noiselessly leave this happy, selfish moment of indulgence. I knock softly on the door on the opposite side of the hall. It takes a long time before Chain swings it open, though I know he wasn’t asleep. His bedroom must have been Sunshine’s. The walls are still painted a soft lilac. We look at each other. Never friends, but not exactly enemies. I saved his life once, and I still think he blames me for it.

  “You shouldn’t tease him like this,” Chain says roughly.

  I know you love him too, I think. It’s not a romantic love, but that equally devoted bond of a brother in arms. No, Chain’s romantic love, that shameful lust he tried so desperately to hide was reserved for another. For Tarren.

  “Come downstairs with me,” I tell him, “and call Bear. I’ll need all of your guys.”

  Chain frowns, his dark eyes growing more suspicious. His aura ticks. “This an op?”

  I nod.

  Chain looks past me to Rain’s closed door.

  “Let him sleep,” I say. “I need to be gone when he wakes up.”

  Chain gives me another measuring look. He is not stupid. “Guessing you don’t plan on coming back from this.”

  When I don’t answer, he scowls at me and says, “What a bitch, coming here. Doing this to him.”

  He’s right. It was selfish. Terrible. Building up that little happiness inside of Rain, knowing that I was going to make another crack in his life. At least I won’t have to live with myself much longer.

  “Call Bear,” I say to Chain.

  Chapter 43 – Tarren

  Maya and Gabe walk through my dreams almost every night. My sister Tammy and my mother occasionally join them. Sometimes we are on a mission together, staking out an angel’s home, but mostly we are in a car, usually the gray Ford Focus my mother drove for two years when she first started taking us on the missions. I learned how to drive in that car, mostly out of necessity when they needed a getaway.

  In my dreams, we drive down an endless highway, and all the parts of America I have seen blur into indistinct fields and prairie and farmland on either side. We speak and say true things to each other, the things we never said in reality, all those tensions and resentments and feelings that lingered under the surface.

  When I wake up, I can always remember the scene but never the words. Always the faces, Gabe’s bright brown eyes, the press of Maya’s lips as she thinks, Tammy’s bawdy smile – the one she wore after telling the most cutting joke.

  The few seconds between sleeping and waking are the worst seconds. It feels like I am being torn away from them again and again, and then the early light is washing through my eyelids. I turn and breathe in the lingering scent of Danielle’s perfume on the empty pillow next to mine and wonder how she keeps slipping into my bed without waking me.

  ***

  My chest aches, but not too painfully as I push open the front door to Danielle’s house and step inside. I already feel the tightness on the left side of my jaw, and when I bring my hand up, the skin is hot and swollen. Fernando is a cagey fighter who specializes in ferocious fast jabs. I made him pay for that tag he gave me, though.

  Mike had let out a belly laugh when I’d taken one of his rising stars down onto the mat. It’d been a good sparring session. I’m still not fast enough, nor strong enough, and my right hand is a significant liability. My reflexes have slowed significantly over the past two years. The constant pace of the mission stole away time for lessons and training…but it’s all coming back; the strength, the energy, the intuition of movement.

  It’s been a little over a month since the raid in Lock Haven, and the wide impact bruise on my chest is only the faintest splash of yellows. I can bend the last three fingers on my right hand a little more than last week. I work on it every day, picking up different objects, writing, typing, idly tapping the keys on Danielle’s grand piano when she isn’t in the house.

  She is home now. I know by the slinky black dress that hugs her breasts and bottom so well that she must have arrived just before me. Those tall, tall heels look like an invitation to fall, but an angel never trips. She wrinkles her nose before she even looks up at me, and when she does, her eyes widen.

  “You get in a fight?”

  My first instinct is silence, give her as little information as possible. But why? I have to remind myself that I don’t need secrets anymore. “Sparring. Little MMA gym in Boulder City.”

  An eyebrow lifts. She must wonder how I’m paying for it, since I’ve refused the allowance she coyly offered in exchange for certain services that she was all too happy to detail. Mike is letting me drop into a few classes a week if I stay behind to spar with a handful of his younger protégées. Most of the other guys in the gym have been training under him for years. They have the same moves, the same tricks. My fighting style is flavored from a dozen different disciplines and teachers. It gives them something new to train against, even if I could be faster and stronger.

  I set my gym bag at my feet and push aside my natural urge to stay quiet. We have only ever fought, Danielle and I, but we need to learn something different now. How to live together.

  “How much did you pull in at the casinos?” I ask.

  She sits on the edge of her white leather couch and uncoils a sly smile. Her dark hair is still pulled tight into a bun at the nape of her neck, and my fingers tingle with the urge to pull all those strands free.

  “Twelve grand. Slow night,” she says.

  “You need to be careful,” I tell her. “You can’t take too much too often.”

  She laughs and flicks away my concern with her blood-red nails. “Baby, I’ve been doing this for eight years. Men love losing to me in Texas Hold ‘Em. I can tell.” She taps her temple, and I wonder as I have so many times what it would be like to see the auras as she described them to me years ago. I can see the color of a man’s needs as plain as the color of his eyes. That’s what she’d told me.

  “You got some mail, by the way,” Danielle says and laughs as if this were her own little joke. A red nail points to a single envelope casually tossed on the coffee table, a glass construction with too many bendy curves.

  I know exactly what the letter is, and I hold back my excitement, so she won’t see it on my face or in my aura. I won’t give her every secret. I walk to the coffee table, pick up the letter, and carefully pull up the flap so I don’t have to make a jagged rip. I don’t take the folded sheet out, just assure myself that the cashier’s check from Paypal is for the right amount, $462.72.

  My first check. My money that I earned from the online tutoring site. I will use this check to open a checking account at the nearby credit union. This will allow me to wirelessly transfer Danielle the money that I owe her for my clothes. I will tutor for more hours, make more money, and pay Danielle back for my laptop. Then I will save. The spring and summer semesters at the community college won’t be feasible, but when the fall semester starts, I should have enough to enroll, at least with a part-time course load.

  “You’re smiling,” Danielle says, her voice tinged with wonderment. “I’ve never seen you smile like that.”

  I quickly control my features and pick up my gym bag. I will go to the bank this afternoon, but first… “I need to take a shower.”

  “Can I come with you?” Danielle asks. I ignore her.

  ***

  Tonight, I will catch her. I lie in bed on my stomach, eyes closed, breathing steady. I find that quiet, empty place, the way Mom taught us so that our emotions wouldn’t alert an angel to our presence as we stalked them. Down, down, into the darkness and the quiet. I didn’t like this place when I was young, but after Tammy died, this became my refuge. A place beyond memory, beyond guilt, and regret.

  One hour. Two hours.

  I don’t hear the door open, nor her silent footsteps across the wooden floor. Only the careful movement of the blanket lifting reveals her presence and then the barest shake of the bed as she lays herself down. I stay in the dark, in the quiet.

  She waits three long minutes, and so do I. She moves closer, touches my arm. I feel her breath against my shoulder, warm, tickling. Her cool fingers touch my face, the scar.

  I flinch. She lets out a little gasp. I grab her wrist and pull her hand away. I can only see the outline of her face in the darkness, but I can hear the short, panting breaths. She wasn’t prepared, and she almost lost control.

  It takes a moment for her to collect herself, and then she says, “You caught me,” in a little teasing voice.

  I need to save her. The realization slams into me. In all the years Lo and I worked on the Cure together, I never intended to save Danielle. My search for the antidote was only for Maya, but when I look at Danielle, breathe in her expensive perfume, I recognize that something is growing beneath the desire and self-loathing she always conjures within me. Not a fondness. Nothing near love. But a comfort.

  I need to save her, I think again. There isn’t much time. Lo was so close when Maya was captured. Compound 731 needs months of testing, but Lo might rush it.

  “Can I stay?” Danielle asks softly. As if this weren’t her house, her bed. As if I hadn’t already agreed to be hers forever.

  Chapter 44 – Maya

  The air in Connecticut is hotter and stickier than I remember. I stand across the street from a normal house on a normal street in an utterly normal suburb. When I lived in that house, I used to hate how normal everything was. I rebelled against the normalness with too much eyeliner and purple bangs. Now I long for that normalcy. I look at the house and feel like a stranger within my own skin.

  I shouldn’t be here. Tarren told me I could never come back. Grand was hunting for me in the beginning and might have had someone watching the house, waiting for a moment of weakness when I would come running back to my parents.

  But Tarren is dead, and Grand is dead too. I killed them both. Brother and father. Tarren, I need your strength for what I have to do, I think. I need that calm that seemed unbreakable.

  A large, red, utterly normal minivan trundles down the street, jaunty pop song seeping from the windows. The van makes a wide swing into the driveway of the house. A thin, beautiful woman, a MILF to the first degree, sits behind the wheel, and two small heads bob in the back seats. The garage rumbles up, the van pulls inside.

  “They moved,” I say, stupefied. Karen and Henry, my adoptive parents, have moved. Was it because of me? Did the house seem haunted with my memories after I disappeared and was presumed dead? Maybe Henry just got transferred to a satellite office, or Karen discovered that the house was too close to electric wires, or something else.

  Either way, my room must be gone. My eyes flick to the window. Yes, I see it now, the wisp of pink princess curtains hanging against the glass. Karen and Henry must have taken down my picture board and my posters, and given away all my books and my clothes. But not my Raggedy Ann doll. That thing was too old, too worn from years of devotion for anyone else to love. Actually, now that I think about it, they wouldn’t have packed my stuff up themselves. Henry would have hired a company to do it.