How to Kill Yourself in a Small Town (2 page)

“But
she is going to find you a protector?” Harper asked.

Jax
made a fart sound. For a guy who was supposed to be a genius, he wasn’t real
eloquent.

“What’s
your problem?” Harper snapped.

“Having
the Matchmaker put Tough’s name out there is like hanging an Eat-Me sign on him
and Kathan knows it,” Jax said. “It’s a miracle a bunch of NPs didn’t chase him
home. If I was one, I’d hang around outside the Matchmaker’s office and just
snap ‘em up as they came out.”

“Yeah,
well, you’re not an NP, and Tough’s going to be fine,” Harper said. She rubbed
my shoulder and I missed a zombie.

“Nice
shot,” Jax said.

I
flipped him the bird, reloaded, and got the zombie with the second round.

Harper
was one of those straight-up country girls with the Ford shirts and sexy
tore-up jeans, so it wasn’t any wonder that she always made me a little crazy,
but country boy never was Harper’s type. Gamers with photographic memories and
mile-high IQs like Jax were more her style, I guess.

“Isn’t
there some kind of rule about not messing with anyone the Matchmaker’s got
under contract?” Harper asked.

“NPs
and their fucking rules,” Jax said.

I
nodded and pointed at Jax.
NPs and their fucking rules.

As
if it couldn’t stand to let me forget how great life was going, the radio next
door started playing the cover of “Tulsa Time” by “the winner of this year’s
Who
Wants to Be a Country Singing Idol,
Jason Gudehaus!”

A
zombie bit my guy. I threw my controller onto the coffee table and fell back
against the couch.

Harper
jumped up to shut the window and the little red crystal charm on her
bellybutton ring jingled. Jax paused the game and turned the volume all the way
up. He didn’t even say anything about taking it easy on the controller.

It
was the middle of August, a million degrees, and we didn’t have an air
conditioner. We sat in the living room with the windows closed, half-dying from
heat stroke, listening to zombies groan and blood spurt until Jason’s song was
over.

Having
friends was something Colt and Ryder never understood. Even if there wasn’t any
rule against leaving and I could get away from Halo, I would eventually come
back for Harper and Jax.

Desty

“And
this is the Dark Mansion.” The tour guide gestured behind her as our bus turned
down the lane. “Home to Halo’s mayor, Kathan Dark.”

I
swiped my bangs out of my eyes and craned my neck to see the mansion better. It
looked like someone had grabbed a cathedral out of the Middle Ages and dropped
it onto a farm in rural Missouri. A cathedral with a parking lot. Off to one
side was a long, low building that had to be the foot soldiers’ barracks, and
next to that, an old barn that looked like it was clinging to those last couple
of bent, rusty cow panels for dear life.

Tempie
had to be in there. The Dark Mansion was exactly the kind of Fallen Angel Dream
Home she had described on her blog.

I
got a death grip on my backpack straps.

I
can do this,
I told myself.
I can.

Unless
they recognized me at the front door and realized why I was there. Crap. Why
hadn’t it occurred to me before that very second that other people might just
notice that Tempie and I were identical twins? Say, when I was shelling out the
twenty bucks to take this stupid tour?

 I
started to swipe my bangs out of my eyes—they were in that weird stage where
they were always in my eyes but too short to tuck behind my ear—but I stopped.
Maybe having my hair in my face would be enough to obscure my identity. I ducked
my head and tried to look like I was just messing with my bangs, not purposely
pulling them back into my eyes.

Oh,
yeah, totally nonchalant.

But
no one looked my way. Up front, the tour guide was still lecturing.

“Most
people know that these grounds house the fallen angel foot soldiers,” she said.
“But what you may not know is that this was also the site of one of the final
battles between people and non-people before the Armistice was signed.”

The
know-it-all in the seat in front of me raised his hand. “Isn’t it true that
this land was originally a farm belonging to Daniel Whitney, the man who
instigated the NP-Human Conflict?”

The
whole ride out of town, Know-It-All had been asking questions that showed
everyone else how smart he was.

“That
is true,” the tour guide said, flashing her big, white smile. “Former pastor,
Daniel Whitney, lived here with his wife and four children. Many historians
believe that Whitney blamed the death of his wife, Shannon, on what he called
‘the hell spawn of Satan—’” She did the finger quotes. “—and that sparked his
desire to ‘scour them from the face of the earth.’ However, eye-witness
accounts have surfaced recently that suggest Shannon Colter-Whitney—who music
buffs might remember as the former lead singer of The Lost Derringers—was
having an affair with an NP and Daniel Whitney killed her in a jealous rage.”
She waited out the appropriate oohs. “Whatever the case may be, Whitney was
deeply intolerant of the fallen angel community in Halo and refused to ‘abide’
their presence—which, as you said, led to the outbreak of the NP-Human
Conflict.”

The
bus rolled to a stop and my heart gave a frantic little jump.

Take
it easy,
I thought. If Tempie was there, she probably wouldn’t just
appear and agree to go home all ecstatic that I had found her.

The
tour guide led us off the bus and up the mansion’s front steps. The door swung
open exactly the way it would have in a scary movie.

At
least there weren’t any security guards. And no immediate sign of Tempie in the
entrance hall. I took a deep breath and prayed I didn’t look as conspicuous as
I felt.

Everyone
else was studying the architecture, so I did, too. Maybe I could memorize the
layout or something in case Tempie and I had to make a break for it when I
found her. But the stained glass windows lining the walls kept distracting me.
Rather than filtering the morning light through in reds and blacks, the windows
held it back. I couldn’t make out any pattern to the colors. The longer I
stared, the more my skin tried to crawl off my body and my eyes teared up.

“Photography
inside the Dark Mansion is discouraged,” the tour guide said to someone behind
me. “Fun fact—the non-person energies concentrated here used to set film on
fire. Nowadays with the digital, it just wipes the camera’s card.”

“Why
isn’t there a particular picture or pattern to the windows?” an old, aw-shucks
guy asked.

“Excellent
and telling question,” the tour guide said. “There are several theories about
why certain people can or can’t see the scenes depicted in the Hell Windows.
The one that the fallen angels substantiate is that the windows show their
images only to those souls bound for Hell.”

That
got everyone looking around at each other. For a few seconds anyway, because
then the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen came striding into the entrance
hall like he owned the place.

He
didn’t have a shirt on, just a pair of black silk pajama pants, and his
chocolate-brown hair was the epitome of sex-swept disarray. Muscles rippled
under his caramel skin, and massive black wings glittering like liquid obsidian
folded gracefully behind his back.

The
woman standing beside me made a strangled sound in her throat.

“The
nine-forty-five tour group,” the fallen angel said. He smiled at me and I swear
my knees almost gave out. “Right on time, as always, but I’m afraid you’ve
caught me unprepared. Come in, please, and continue your tour. I’ll meet you
back here when you’re finished.”

The
tour guide grinned at him like she was in love. And how could you not be?

“Thank
you, Mayor Dark,” she squeaked.

Mayor
Dark. The Mayor Dark? I’d seen him on the news before, but in real life—and
half-naked—wow. Just wow.

He
left the way he’d come and as soon as he was out of sight, people started
whispering to their travel buddies about how gorgeous he was, how he’d probably
just climbed out of bed with his human lover.

“The
feathers on his wings…they were covered in that black stuff…I expected black
feathers, but there was that…”

Everyone
was staring at me.

Oh,
please, somebody kill me.
That last isn’t-he-dreamy voice had been
mine.

To
make sure I knew how stupid I should feel, the know-it-all from the bus turned
to his travel buddy and whispered at the top of his lungs, “You hear that high
school dropout over there? Everybody knows the tar covered their wings to mark
their sins.”

My
fingernails dug into my palms. I wasn’t a dropout—I had been our class’s
freaking valedictorian. I had acceptance letters from Harvard, Oxford, and
Arrowood gathering dust in my bedroom back home. I knew more about fallen
angels than Know-It-All knew about being a superior jerk.

I’d
just never been in the same room with one before.

If
Tempie had been there, she would’ve said something to Know-It-All that would
destroy him emotionally. She was so good at being badass. All I did was look
like an idiot and wish it was possible to kick a guy in the crotch with your
mind.

“Follow
me, everyone,” the tour guide said, backing through a set of double doors into
a sort of throne-room with a dais at the front. “This is the parlor. Because
Halo doesn’t have a regular city hall, town council meetings and circuit court
are held here every third Monday evening and every first Saturday. During the
rest of the month, this is where the fallen angels entertain, hold various
charity functions, and especially lavish parties.”

“I’ll
bet that throne up front is the mayor’s,” Know-It-All told his buddy.

I
wished Tempie was there so I could whisper “You think?” to her loudly enough
that Know-It-All would hear.

The
tour guide led us through the dining room, a common room, some halls, then into
the visitor’s wing, pointing out items of interest along the way. After a while
my embarrassment started to wear off and it occurred to me that if not for all
the soaring colonnades, stained glass Hell Windows, and straight-up unashamed
excess of the furnishings, you might start to freak out that you hadn’t run
into a single other being yet in all that space.

“You
all are a very lucky group to have come while the guest wing wasn’t completely
full,” the tour guide said, sweeping her arm around the visitor’s breakfast
nook. “In today’s globalized world, political leaders, corporate
representatives, and influential dignitaries both human and non-person visit on
a regular basis. And of course, this wing will be full by the weekend with the
Armistice Celebration coming.”

“I’d
ask why not put them up at a hotel,” the old, aw-shucks guy said. He touched
the velvet wall paper. “But this’d sure put any five star I ever seen to
shame.”

The
tour guide laughed and started to reply, but a voice from behind us cut her
off.

“It’s
true, we love to share our sensual pleasures, but the function of the visitor’s
wing is two-fold.”

We
all turned at the same time to face the new speaker. She was just as stunning
as Mayor Dark had been, with her sparkling, wet-black wings and caramel skin.
If they hadn’t looked so good on her, the scarlet cocktail dress and dominatrix
heels might’ve seemed like overkill.

“It
allows us to show hospitality to our guests,” the fallen angel said, “And it
puts them at ease, knowing we have nothing to hide.”

She
stepped into the room with us and you could feel the temperature crank up ten
degrees. Men stood up straighter, women fussed with their necklaces and hair.
When I realized I was winding the excess cord from my backpack straps around my
fingers, I shoved my hands into my pockets.

The
fallen angel looked at the door as if she was waiting for something.

A
second later, a man naked except for one of those spiked pit bull collars came
into the room and dropped to his knees at her feet. The kind of sexy,
hard-bodied guy I used to fantasize about dating when I got to college. The bad
boy nonconformist who, dressed, would work on his motorcycle while debating the
fundamental differences between Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. The
words “Resist or Serve” were tattooed across his chest and a cross surrounded
by text wrapped around his left bicep.

He’s
her familiar.
The thought snapped me out of my idiotic high
school fantasies. I was standing there staring at a fallen angel’s
honest-to-God familiar. What if somebody was trying to find him, too? A younger
sister or maybe a girlfriend.

I
tried to catch Resist-or-Serve’s eye, but his gaze was locked onto the floor.
He couldn’t be much older than me, somewhere in his early twenties. Did that
make him another empty-headed angel-groupie, or had things gotten so bad at his
house that being a fallen angel’s slave had seemed like a decent alternative?

“It’s
been ten years since the Armistice was signed,” the fallen angel said, stroking
her fingers through Resist-or-Serve’s black hair like a cat she barely noticed
anymore, “But in our view of time, a decade is just a drop in the bucket. As
you can imagine, a world that only recently accepted the fact of our existence
and even more lately came to peace with us is still a little gun-shy of our
motives.”

Out
of nowhere, the fallen angel laughed.

“Forgive
me, Alice, I seem to have disrupted your tour,” she said.

“That’s
really no problem, Mikal,” the tour guide gushed. “I’m sure no one here has any
objections. Please, continue if you’d like.”

“Well,
unless I’m mistaken, this is the last stop inside the house, isn’t it? From
here you’ll go back to meet with Kathan, then out to tour the barracks?”

“We
actually had to stop giving that portion of the tour.”

Mikal’s
laugh turned into a purr in her throat. “I suppose we should have seen that
coming. Humans just aren’t used to seeing so many of us in one place. And I’m
sure the soldiers didn’t try to tone it down any.”

An
army of fallen angel foot soldiers promising sexual bliss with smoldering
glances? Sounded like the comments section on Tempie’s blog. Or like a dream
I’d had once in junior high that made me orgasm in my sleep.

“Well,
how about we open the tour up to questions?” Mikal shrugged and her black wings
mimicked the motion. “Anyone have something you’ve been dying to ask a fallen
angel?”

“You’re
the enforcer, aren’t you?” Know-It-All asked. “I read that fallen angels move
in packs, like wolves, with an alpha, an enforcer, and foot soldiers.”

“I
am. Kathan makes the rules and I ensure that they’re followed. Kind of like the
government, isn’t it?” Mikal said. She seemed to find that funny, too. “You’d
all better watch your step.”

A
couple people laughed, but a couple people probably wet their pants, too.

Know-It-All
piped up again. Obviously he was the only one without the sense to be too
scared and aroused to do anything but stare.

“He’s
your familiar, isn’t he?” Know-It-All asked, pointing as if Resist-or-Serve
wasn’t in the room. And the way Resist-or-Serve was staring down at the floor,
maybe he wasn’t. “How do you choose someone to enthrall?”