“Please Francesca.” My throat is closing up. “Say no. You have to, so I can…”

  She steps onto the porch and pulls me into an embrace.

  Stupid, pathetic me. I just go to pieces right there in her arms. Clinging to Francesca, sobbing into the long waves of her dark hair and sleep-smelling skin, I feel all the little cracks that have built up in my heart splicing deeper, going right into the center. I just can’t hold the thing together anymore, and I don’t want to.

  Chapter 66 – Maya

  I pin Tarren with a hard stare. “Are you watching?”

  He nods studiously.

  I bend down over the squirming mound of flesh, put my lips against Tammy’s belly, and blow. PFFFFFHHTTT. Perfect fart noise, if I do say so myself. Tammy screeches with giggles, her arms and legs dancing with glee.

  I sit back on my heels and give Tarren a satisfied smile. “Now you.” I beckon to the tummy.

  Tarren gives me a look that mingles equal parts dread, unease, and befuddlement.

  “You’re a dad now,” I inform him. “That means no more pride and nobility for you. Might as well just go out and buy a minivan right now.”

  Tarren’s mouth tightens into a scowl.

  “Hey,” I point a finger at him. “I’m not the one with a secret child. A secret love child,” I emphasize. Yep, still not exactly over that little surprise. “Now, blow.”

  Tarren looks down at the belly and the expectant eyes of his daughter, wide and blue. He squares his shoulders, lowers his head, and makes a tepid attempt. Pfffffffff.

  “Maya, Maya, Maya, Maya!” Tammy cries out. “Taywen can’t do it right.”

  “Yes, little Tammy. It seems that your father is severely fun-dicapped,” I agree.

  Tarren sits back on his heels. That look of equal parts dread, unease, and befuddlement on his face? It’s pretty much his new favorite expression. Since I woke up two days ago in this strange new universe, I’ve caught Tarren staring at Tammy like she’s this complicated equation he can’t figure out or some extremely volatile chemical that will explode in his face if he drops it.

  Not to worry though. It turns out that I am a most epic aunt. Wouldn’t have guessed it myself, but Tammy is just…she’s become my everything. Her smiles and giggles ease the quivering knot in my stomach, a knot named Gabe. We should be searching for him right now, yesterday would have been better, but Tarren insists I still need to rest, heal.

  Tammy is uniquely qualified to divert my worries. We’ve played princesses, and tea party, and airplane, which involves me tossing Tammy up almost to the ceiling and catching her, to Tarren’s delight. And by “delight,” I mean ulcer-inducing horror. Our favorite game, though, is Ariel swim sing-along, which entails dragging ourselves around the floor singing, “Part of your world!” over and over again. Someone started the trend of screaming, “Ursula!” and frantically dragging ourselves behind the couch whenever Tarren enters the room. Not going to say who.

  Okay, it was me.

  Guy needs to take the helicopter parenting down about a hundred notches. He’s already generated rules on top of rules on top of rules. Some of them make sense. He’s pretty much scared to death that I’m going to drain the last drop of energy out of his progeny. I have to feed with the Prism no more than three hours before I’m allowed to play with Tammy and tape my hands like a boxer, along with my normal precaution of wearing fingerless gloves.

  Some of Tarren’s other rules are, in my oh-so-humble opinion, not as necessary. When he insists that Tammy have her bath at 7 p.m. and be in bed by 8, I am his natural counterbalance, keeping her up an extra hour telling stories and stepping all over the two-cookie-a-day mandate.

  All in all, Tammy is a little bubble of joy in a world that’s gone crazy.

  After I woke up cloaked in sunlight, I discovered that the world had woken up, too. The news outlets have been blaring non-stop about a new type of human. They don’t use the word “Angel” to describe them, thankfully. The formal term has simply been “genetically altered human being,” but the internet has already done its thing, generating plenty of its own new nomenclature.

  The name that seems to be winning the Twitter wars is “Hamps,” shorthand for heat vampires. Rain is probably thrilled that the term “Soul Suckers” is getting some traction, since that was his personal favorite. Rain. Every time his face flashes through my mind, it reopens the twin aches of guilt and regret in my chest. Only happens, oh, about a hundred times a day and a thousand times at night.

  The news helps to distract me, and Hamps are the news. All those videos and personal stories that lingered at the edges of the internet for the past three years are suddenly on a rolling loop on CNN and the other major networks. Whole hour-long special reports are dedicated to tallying up the wealthy businessmen, minor celebrities, athletes, and politicians who have croaked over the last week. There are mutterings that a lab in China is already trying to recreate the Hamp formula and that certain unnamed athletes are asking for the concoction.

  At least the general hysteria seems to be subsiding. A few decaying bodies are still being found each day, but no one else is getting sick. The Red Death didn’t mutate, which I know is a major relief to Tarren. The CDC estimates that disease killed over 5,000 in the U.S. alone. No one knows what the total worldwide body count is yet.

  On the third day of my recovery, I inform Tarren that I am well enough recovered and that it’s time to start looking for Gabe. Tarren takes note of my expression, and he doesn’t argue. I’m not the only one being eaten alive by worry.

  We pack ourselves into a sleek black Beamer, and Tarren drives up to the mountain. On the way over, I keep thinking about that number: 5,000 dead. I picture all the bodies stacked like cordwood. I did that, I think, and I don’t know how to feel about this. Does this count as genocide? Am I at the level of Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot? Do I have a throne waiting for me in some deep, dark Hall of Terrible, Evil People?

  I ask Tarren this just after we turn off the road onto the bumpy path that will take us to the mountain.

  “Bump!” Tammy cries in delight while Tarren considers the state of my soul.

  He is his usual supportive self.

  “Your responsibility is only partial at best,” he says. “Lo and I created The Cure. Lo devised the release strategy, and over a dozen Totem members, from your account, participated in the Cure’s release with you.”

  “How do you feel about it?” I ask, looking at him.

  “It was necessary,” he says without a pause, but I see the short spikes in his aura, their red tips, and I know he is grappling with this, as I am. “Five thousand angels in the U.S. alone,” he says. “If they fed once every three days, they’d be responsible for taking over 600,000 lives a year.”

  “Bump!”

  “It’s kind of astounding the humans didn’t figure it out until now,” I say.

  Tarren gives a little shrug. “The angel population was very small, less than five hundred by my calculation, for the first 15 years of their existence. It was only in the last few years that the numbers started to rise. I don’t think their population was more than 1,000 before War started building his army. Everything was about to come tumbling down.”

  “Thanks,” I mutter. Maybe that’s the comfort I really need – the certainty that I prevented more deaths, possibly a full-scale war, by doing what I did.

  We are quiet, but I keep staring at my brother. This new reality still hits me with great huge wallops at odd times. Tarren is alive. He’s here, right in front of me. I can feel his aura. See his mouth tighten into those familiar little scowls.

  I didn’t kill him. The relief of that knowledge feels like I’ve been released from a steel corset that was crushing my ribs. It turns out that I only drained Tarren a little, apparently at his insistence. That would have been very, very useful to know when I was in my spiral of darkness, desperate to nobly sacrifice myself to get rid of my own guilt as well as save Gabe from having to see his brother’s killer every day.

  Tarren won’t tell me much about Tammy’s mother. Only that her name was Danielle, that she got him out of the house after I drained him, and that she died. The whispers of red that touch the edges of his aura when he says her name tell me a story of their own.

  I have a lot of pieces, a lot of little secrets, and I am starting to put them together. I think Danielle has been lurking at the edges of our lives, pulling Tarren’s strings all along. She is the one he went to when Gabe almost died in Grand’s warehouse. Hers was the panicked voice on the other end of the phone that led him to leave abruptly two years ago with only his duffle bag and our first aid kit. She was the woman who survived his bullet in Las Vegas, the one who saved Gabe from certain doom.

  And she was an angel. Talk about mind benders. Talk about hypocrisy. I don’t even know how to process this information. Gallant Tarren. I thought he was married to Diana’s stringent rule book. Turns out he was farther over the line than any of us.

  But because of Danielle, we have Tammy, my magical unicorn.

  The mountain looms in front of us, and I straighten in my seat as my eyes automatically climb the path. Part of me is fervently searching for a figure in a backwards baseball cap sitting patiently in the alcove, while the other half remembers fevered dreams of mountain songs and crawling over rocks and memories of lost faces. My gaze flinches away from the jutting rock where I almost took my fated swan dive.

  The mountain path is empty. Tarren pulls the BMW next to my silver rental that still sits at the base of the mountain, its driver’s side door gaping open and inviting in the blowing grit.

  “We’ll bring a new battery for it tomorrow and then you can drop it off at the rental place,” Tarren says, as if reading my mind. “I suggest getting it cleaned first.”

  “At least I’ll have clothes that fit,” I say. I can see my duffle bag sitting unperturbed in the backseat. It’ll be nice to wear something loose and comfortable, after pouring myself into Danielle’s tight, beautiful clothes that are only loose and airy around my small boobs.

  My eyes wander the mountain again, just in case somehow my keen sight missed the movement of a person, of Gabe. Chain confirmed that he isn’t at the rental house in New Hampshire, and he hasn’t contacted the Totem or Lo. We could call him…except I took his phone with me when I left on my suicide mission.

  I want to drive out and start looking for him, but Tarren explained in that utterly dry, analytical way of his, “We don’t know where he would have gone. There is no point in searching if we have no guesses.”

  So, we will watch the mountain, a place where I can sit on the dusty ground and set out the Prism. A place where Gabe might come if he wants to find us as much as we want to find him.

  Small problem, though. How could Gabe know to come here? He thinks that we are both dead. Tarren and I don’t say the thing that we both know. The thing that fills me with a black sludge of dread.

  What would Gabe do if he thought he was all alone in the world?

  I think I know the answer, and I desperately try to ignore it. We wait. We watch. But I know he won’t come to the mountain.

  Chapter 67 – Gabe

  Francesca tells me I slept for two days straight after she half-coaxed, half-dragged me to the bed. I don’t remember any of it. Just weeping in her arms on the porch, the feeling of floating away, the relief of it. I think it would have been nice to die in Francesca’s arms. I mean, not for her, of course, but it would have saved me from this…whatever this is.

  Francesca says I’m suffering from severe exhaustion. There’s a damn easy cure for that, I think, but I don’t say it out loud. Francesca seems to read my mind anyway.

  “Stay,” she says the first time I remember being awake.

  I can pick a pair of handcuffs blindfolded, get through an electronic deadbolt in a jiffy, but I can’t escape her big brown eyes or that soft, pleading voice. So I try to get better for her, though I know she just feels sorry for me – like a little girl who finds a bird with a broken wing. She greets me every morning with a plate full of real food, like bananas and bagels and orange juice. She is good about not leaving me alone and giving me space at the same time. I only realize later that she must have skipped her classes and taken the week off at the hospital where she interned.

  Sometimes we just sit on the couch together, and she reads or puts on an old movie that I might have liked when I cared about stuff like that. The whole time we don’t talk about anything, and she never tries to feed me any bullshit about how sorry she is that my whole family is dead.

  The night becomes this new terrible thing. I feel the anxiety crawling up my back as I lay down on the couch and pull Francesca’s extra blanket over my shoulders. Every time I close my eyes, the nightmares come for me. For some reason it’s always Tarren the day I found him in that car right after Grand cut him up. I’d never had nightmares about that before, even right after it happened, but now every night I see him bleeding out, dirt smeared on his hands and arms. Sometimes I’m trying to drive him to Dr. Lee, and other times I have the knife in my hand, or Maya chases us with a big butcher knife. The worst though are the dreams when I find Tarren in the car smiling up at me and cutting himself.

  My new morning routine is all about jerking awake in a puddle of stale sweat while my heart pounds like it’s trying to break a new speed record. Then it’s all about making an effort to get up. Things that used to be utterly mindless, like combing my hair, changing my shirt, and gargling mouthwash now seem to take all the strength I have. I even try to find little things to be grateful for – when the rain stops, the softness of the pillow, the fact that Francesca is just a room away doing yoga in her bedroom. I really do try.

  And my old sidekick is back. When I do my flailing, sweating wakey-wakey routine, Sir Hopsalot is there, just chillaxing on the couch with me, his little gray nose bouncing up and down. Sometimes when the memories really get to me, the only anchor I have is the feel of his soft fur under my hand. He doesn’t seem to mind on those mornings when I have to pet him for an hour, for two, before I can get up.

  Today, Francesca suggests a walk. The thought of leaving the little oasis of her condo is so terrifying I start sweating just thinking about it, but I nod, like it’s no big deal. She drives us to a wooded running path a few miles away and says it reminds her of the woods around Dr. Lee’s cabin. We amble together. The day is hot, and my body feels crazy weak. I wonder if Francesca is going to give me some sappy pep talk about how the dead can live forever in our memories, or maybe she just wants to inform me that she’s tired of taking care of my pathetic ass. Wouldn’t blame her for that.

  Instead, she tells me about growing up in the Italian slums. About a single mother who could never put enough food on the table. Of meeting the recruiter with the slicked black hair and posing in her best friend’s bikini for the pictures. I found those pictures easily enough when she first started working for Dr. Lee. Actually, about four years ago I spent a very unreasonable amount of time pulling them off of about a dozen skeevy websites and leaving a little fuck-you virus as my calling card. If I close my eyes I can see those pictures perfectly in my mind. Francesca had been so young, a little girl with big, scared eyes almost begging for a hero.

  Francesca is telling me about that first plane ride, how she’d felt thrilled and terrified at the same time as she crossed an ocean. Then, her voice softens as she gets to the part of the burly stranger who waited for her at the American airport and slipped a simple ring on her finger. She tells me about his drinking and the bruises that followed, cycles of paranoia and babbling forgiveness in a language she was just learning to understand. How she found work with Dr. Lee, and how he set her jaw on the worst night and offered her his home as a sanctuary.

  She mailed the ring back and started to study for her GED.

  My blood boils as I listen to her story. I’d known about the marriage and the divorce from a quick search of public records, but nothing about the abuse. I’m going to kill him. Plain and simple. No, not kill. Maim. A few fingers, some toes. Castration. Yes, definitely castration. I bet I can even keep him awake long enough so that he’ll have to watch it.

  Francesca’s hand touches my arm. Probably shouldn’t have been scheming out loud. When she asks me not to go after him, I think it’s the hardest promise I ever make, but I do it for her.

  I make another promise as we head back to Bessie, this one a silent bond between me and my better angels, wherever they are. No more drinking. Not even a gulp of my best friend Jack Daniels. Not ever again.

  After we get back from the hike, I grab good old Starbuck out of the clutter in Bessie’s backseat, give her a little juice, and boot her up. I want to see if the Red Death really worked. Did Maya and the Totem truly wipe out all the angels? I dig around in my files and find my old angel hunting algorithm. Starbuck processes like a champ, searching obituaries and police reports, looking for the keywords that might indicate an angel victim.

  She gives me a load of results, and I feel a twinge of fear as my eyes run down the list, but as I comb through them, I can’t find anything that clearly says angel. These are real accidents and heart attacks. After four hours of searching, I don’t have a single good angel trail.

  “Damn, they did it,” I say out loud. Tarren, Maya, and the Totem actually won the war, while I sat on my drunk ass and pouted about how unfair the world is. I take a moment to really appreciate that. All of Tarren’s brains. All of Maya’s courage. They saved millions of lives. Possibly the entire human race.

  It also means something important – Francesca can go back to Dr. Lee’s cabin. I have an idea. It’s a stupid little thing, but it feels big to me. It feels good. I spend a few hours online watching videos, reading articles, making notes. And then Bessie and I head to Home Depot.

  Chapter 68 – Maya

  I hold off making the call to Rain for three days. I’ve made such a mess of things. Punching in the number to his phone reminds me of the way I felt when I was shot almost years ago. I knew it was bad, but I hadn’t wanted to actually look at the damage. At least not knowing, I could imagine that it was only a flesh wound.