Rising (6 page)

I open up my laptop and review just how
screwed we are on this mission. Peoria is a whole hell of a lot bigger than one
would suspect for a town in Illinois not called Chicago. Over 100,000 people
live in the city itself and almost 400,000 in the surrounding metropolitan
area. How are we supposed to find a single angel among 400,000 people in a
blizzard?

I sit back in the chair and think. If I
were an angel looking for an easy snack, what would I do? The answer is simple.
I’d roam for targets of opportunity, people who were out alone in places of
little visibility. I might go after stranded motorists or even break into
houses where I only sensed a single occupant.

If I were working alone.

Gabe found lots of bodies, which could
mean we’re dealing with multiple wings.
Joy o’ joys.

As night settles in, my photographic
memory soaks in the entire map of Peoria as well as a ton of useless facts
about the city. I still don’t have anything resembling a decent plan of action
to present to Tarren. In the room below I hear a child’s giggles as the bed
springs squeak again.

“Come on, no more jumping, buddy,” the
father says. He sounds tired. A sports show blares from the television.

“Alright guys, what do we want to eat?”
the mother asks, clapping her hands together. “Pizza?”

“Pizza!” Abe cries. “Pizza, pizza,
pizza!”

“God, this is so boring,” Raven groans
in classic teenage fashion. “Can I puh-lease just go to the mall or something?”

“What do you want Raven? Cheese?
Pepperoni?”

“I hate pizza,” the girl snaps back.
“Why couldn’t Dad find a new job in Alexandria?”

“It’ll be nice living close to your
grandparents,” the mother says with absolutely no conviction in her voice.

“You mean living
with
them.”

“I want pizza. I want pizza. And ice
cream,” Abe chants.

“Oh just shut up,” I grumble to myself.
That wonderful family dynamic has been going on below me all day. It’s not like
a sulky teenager, a rambunctious kid, and a tired mom are at fault for my brain
being a huge disappointment when it comes to saving the lives of the innocent,
but it’s easy to blame them anyway.

I feel it instantly, the minute shift in
Tarren’s aura that tells me the nightmares are coming for him. I turn toward
the bed and watch the process begin. Small at first, a few sparks of red glow
in his aura followed by a smattering of sharp spikes. I usually intervene at
the start of it, but today I wait longer, curious to see if his aura will tell
me anything about where he went and what fills him with so much sadness.

It’s a cruel decision for us both.
Tarren’s aura turns ugly, a swirling mass of oranges, golds, and reds. I name out
their associated emotions in my mind –
Regret. Guilt. Pain.
The colors
rise up from his body, powerful and anguished. Those big shoulders flex, and a
moan escapes his lips.

My body reacts to his, the song playing
pure notes of hunger up my bones. My hands are pouring heat, and the skin along
my palms tingles, wanting to pull back and let the feeding bulbs break the
surface. I hold myself in check, staring in awe at the lush colors flooding off
of Tarren, showing me his true face.

In these moments, when I see the torment
inside him as it truly is, I feel so small and weak against it. How can I heal
something like this? How can I possibly put him back together again? How can I
help him forgive himself for killing his sister Tammy?

If he killed her
, a nasty thought whispers in my mind,
which I quickly squelch.

Tarren moans again, and I’m on my feet,
swiftly coming round to the bed. I wake him with a gentle squeeze of the
shoulder. I’ve gotten so good at this that he doesn’t even flail anymore. When
he shudders awake, I quickly step back and keep my face calm so he doesn’t know
how hard it is for me to touch him, be anywhere near him when his aura is loose
and lashing.

Tarren blinks, pants, and casts a
doleful look at me. He hates when I do this, rescue him from the nightmares,
but it’s so much worse for both of us if I let them run their course. He knows
this, so he hasn’t told me to stop, and we both just don’t talk about it.

I sit down at the table again. “I’ve got
all the info up,” I tell him. “Gabe hasn’t been able to discern any patterns
with the bodies in the earlier states.”
And I haven’t come up with a plan,
because I totally suck at life.

Tarren picks up his watch and gives me
one of his more fearsome scowls. “It’s been over six hours,” he accuses in a
dry voice.

I turn toward him. “I would have let you
sleep for twenty.”

We stare at each other. His eyes are
gray and angry. I meet his gaze for a moment longer, and then I turn back to
the computer.

“You want to get started or what?”

Tarren sighs, one of those big, gigantic
Tarren sighs that he keeps in reserve for when my existence becomes the bane of
his. Then he wraps strong chains around his aura, muting those shades of guilt
and sadness beneath the solid cobalt blues of his control. He comes to the table
and drops into the second chair, shifting his position to add distance between
us. I pretend not to notice.

“What are we looking at here?” he asks
with authority, and I begin walking him through the situation.

Fucking Peoria. The storm descends, and
it blinds us with thick snowflakes pouring from the sky, deafens us with
screaming wind, distracts us with stinging hail, and basically makes this the
most impossible mission ever.

I think every crease and crevice of my
body is wet and cold. And it’s all just plain pointless. The town is too big,
the pile of bodies too random. The corpses start showing up right on the eve of
the storm. A motorist was found dead in her car in El Vista, then a nurse dead
at a bus stop downtown, then a 55-year-old chemist in his home in Peoria
Heights. Each victim was killed on a different side of the town, at different
times of the day.

Tarren and I check out each crime scene,
and each time his ionizing radiation detector confirms elevated radiation.
Angel. One the second day, six missing persons are reported, and our police scanner
leads us to three more bodies. Two of the victims are thought to have died
within fifteen minutes of each other on opposite sides of town, confirming what
we already suspected. Multiple angels.

With this many bodies and missing
persons, it’s likely a small group. Tarren surmises that they hunt
individually, spread out across the town, dropping victims like it was going
out of style.

All in all, it’s frustrating as hell.
Tarren doesn’t help anything by being even more unbearable than normal. His
eyes are flint gray, his face set so hard in a mask of determination, I’m
afraid it’s going to get stuck that way. He pushes us on and on and on, like if
we just trudge enough miles through the snow, the angels will give themselves
up and meekly allow us to shoot them in the face. I have to remind Tarren to
eat and force him back to the motel room to shower, thaw out, and catch a
little sleep.

In those few quiet moments when I’m
snuggled under the covers on the cot, allowed four hours of rest, I miss Gabe
so fervently. So utterly. If he weren’t currently refusing to answer any of my
texts, he could lift this heavy curtain of frustration with a joke. He’d also convince
Tarren to pace himself. Tarren will always pretend to rest for Gabe’s sake.

By the morning on the third day of
patrol, the storm is blowing itself out. The wind is hoarse, and the hail turns
into heavy, wet flakes. As the sun rises behind us, Tarren and I stalk the
downtown area on foot where some brave drivers slip and slide toward office
buildings and high-rise condos.

Three deaths have been reported in this
five block radius over the past two days. It’s the only sliver of a pattern
we’ve been able to discern. My brother’s mood has grown darker with each passing,
futile hour. We bicker. The newest objects of his ire are my mittens.

“You can’t shoot in mittens,” Tarren
says.

“I also can’t shoot if my fingers fall
off.” I glance down at my purple mittens, cutely decorated with gray
snowflakes. I purchased them at Target on the way from Farewell, along with a
matching scarf currently wound tightly over my face.

“Your coat is too restrictive. What if
you need to run?”

I touch my padded white parka
protectively. I’d bought Tarren a matching black parka along with gloves and
thermal socks on the same Target run. He might as well have burned them in
front of my face for all the appreciation he showed.

Today Tarren wears his usual – a thin
black jacket, zipped up to his chin, black skintight gloves, and heavy black
boots. The wind tousles his dark hair and turns his nose and ears bright pink.

“I look normal,” I inform him, my voice
muffled beneath my scarf. “You’re the one who looks out of place. You should
wear a hat.” I point to my pale pink knit cap decorated with a border of little
snowmen.

Tarren glances down at me, the usual scowl
in place. I can tell he’s absolutely miserable, but I think that’s half the
point. If he even gave an inch to any but the most basic creature comforts, it
would betray his image as the lone, suffering hero.

“You know, I read somewhere that you
lose 50% of your body heat through your head,” I continue.

“You can’t shoot in mittens,” he repeats,
stepping around a mound of snow that might be a fire hydrant.

“I’ll pull them off as soon as we find
some wings,” I snap back. “You wouldn’t happen to know where any are, would
you?”

Childish comeback, I know, but Tarren
has an uncanny ability to stoke even little sparks of annoyance into raging
flames. I’m pissed and tired and have no idea what we’re doing out here. Tarren
likes to pretend that we’re some kind of elite fighting force, but that’s a
joke. We’re just dumb kids fighting a scattered army of super humans on a
shoestring budget and a few helpful safety tips our mom made up. Most of the
time it feels like we’re just making things up as we go along.

I kick at the ice in front of me. We’ll
have to pack up tonight, get ahead of the storm, and try again farther north. I
imagine more days slugging through the snow while bodies pile up around us.
Joy
‘o fucking joy
.     

“Did you know that Peoria has the
nation’s oldest Santa Claus parade?” I say to try and distract Tarren from
berating my scarf next.

He looks at me, and I expect a rebuke
for introducing a topic not related to our mission.

“What’s a Santa Claus parade?” he asks
and tucks his hands deeper into the pockets of his jacket.

“Oh, it’s just, like, a Christmas parade
with Christmas floats, and usually there’s a marching band playing Christmas
carols, and, of course, Santa comes at the end. They used to have one in my
town when I was a…”

A faint noise pricks at my ears beneath
the howling wind. Alarms go off in my head, but I don’t know why. I strain my
senses, grabbing onto the sound, trying to identify it.

“What is it?” Tarren asks, and I realize
that I’ve stopped.

“I’m not su—” Then it hits me. I know
exactly what the sound is. I’m running, sliding on the icy sidewalk, ripping my
mittens off my hands even before my next thoughts register.

“Maya!” The wind snatches Tarren’s voice
away.

I slide around a corner. My brain begins
to raise doubts even as my legs churn and my body effortlessly adjusts to each
skating stride. There are protocols galore I should be following. We’re never
supposed to separate, never supposed to barrel heedlessly into a situation
without backup, lots of other important stuff that I blithely ignore, because
the choking sound of a dying human grows louder as I plunge down another
street. Ryan made those same gasping noises as he died, and I was helpless to
save him.

Not anymore.

I struggle to dig my Glock 19 out of its
holster beneath my heavy parka. I get it clear as I cut across a street and
skate between two inching SUVs that blare their horns at me.

The choking grows fainter.

All the building frustration of the past
two days kindles into a rush of mad adrenaline. Six more strides take me to a
shadowed alleyway between a bank and an office building. My eyes search the
darkness and land on an overweight policeman sprawled in the snow.

Late. Too late. Again.

Anger boils in my chest, hot as pitch.
If I can’t save the human, I can still put down the angel who murdered him.

Where? Where the fuck are you?

I gaze around, desperate to find
something I can shoot. A faint noise jerks my head up. A woman rises from a
crouched position on the roof of the bank. She has her back to me. A thick
blonde braid trails down her back.

How did she get on the roof?

When she turns her face in profile, I
can see the faint glow beneath her skin that proves she has just fed from a
large energy source. This is my soon-to-be dead angel. Her braid swings as she
runs across the rooftop, eyes focused on a distant point. I raise my gun for a
shot, but then she leaps from the edge of the roof, sailing through the sky as
if she had springs embedded in her feet.

Fuck a goat!
I watch her body gracefully arc through
the air. She lands lightly on a rooftop two buildings away, out of range of my
bullets.

“God damn, mother fucker!” I scream into
the wind, because…well, just because. I can still run her down, but I really
need to connect with Tarren first.

An eruption of noise has me pointing my
gun toward the dead policeman. A crackling voice from the radio clipped to his
belt issues a dispatch about a new traffic accident on the 6.

My phone dings, most assuredly with a
pissed text message from Tarren. He must have lost me. No, he’s coming now. I
feel the faint flicker of human energy moving toward me at a fast clip. He’ll
be mad as all hell when he gets here, but at least I got sights on the angel. We’ll
have something to talk about besides my mittens.

I look down at the dead police officer,
at the wedding band on his finger, and I hate myself for not saving him.

“Shit,” I murmur. He probably has five
adopted children, volunteers at the food pantry each Saturday, and sings in the
church choir.

Tarren comes into the alley behind me,
except it’s not Tarren. I know this the moment I actually take two seconds to
pay attention to my surroundings. Even without looking, I can feel the high octane
energy whipping up behind me, so different from the steady, recessed currents of
Tarren’s aura when he’s in mission mode.

I spin around and face a hooded figure
pointing a gun at me. The upper half of his face is hidden beneath a plastic puma
mask. Our eyes meet for a moment, and his lips turn up into something that is
either a snarl or a scary-as-hell smile.

I leap over the dead body and take off
down the alleyway. He shoots, but I zigzag like Tarren taught me. I skid into a
sharp turn down a different alley, only to feel another aura come up on my
left. I turn to see a second hooded figure running toward me. This one wears a
tiger mask over his face, and a rusted chain hugs his waist. He shoots three
rounds in quick succession, but I jump, grab a window ledge, and flip myself
up.

I run across the iced window ledges leaping
from one to the other. My mind scrambles to understand what’s happening – those
masks, I’ve seen them before – but adrenaline keeps breaking up my stream of
thoughts. I just need to get free of this tightening net.

I come to the edge of the building and
find myself presented with a perpendicular alley. Left or right? I feel auras
coming toward me from each direction. I leap right, landing true, and pound
down the alley. I regrip my gun. They’ve given me little choice. The only way
out of this trap is to get past the human at the end of this alley. If he’s
armed, I can’t risk being gentle.

I feel the other pursuers behind me,
closing in on all sides. They must have someone on the roof directing them.
Smart. Organized. No concussive gunshots, which means silencers on their guns.
Shit
.

My phone buzzes again, this time with an
incoming call. Tarren. I wrestle in my pocket for the phone, but my fingers
freeze as I come to a tall, lanky figure blocking the end of alley.

Bright sunlight glows from the opening
behind him, throwing his entire body into shadow. I can still see the penguin
mask over the top half of his face, and I recognize his aura immediately.

My gun is up, ready to shoot a perfect
dime through his heart. Now, I lower it and stand still, dumb with shock. I see
my own surprise reflected in the wild ripples of his aura as recognition takes
hold on his end.

“Hi,” I manage.

He pulls the trigger of the gun he’s aimed
at me this whole time. I hardly feel the impact, but it’s enough to finally
kick my stupid, stupid brain into gear.

I run at him, my boots kicking up slushy
snow with each step. I struggle to suck in air through the scarf wrapped around
my face. Tarren was right – about the scarf, about the heavy coat and mittens.
I’m lumbering and tangled.

Rain Bailey stands his ground. I angle
at the last moment, avoiding another bullet from his gun. Both feet hit the
wall, and I rebound up and over Rain, my boots dropping chunks of ice on his
head. I land awkwardly, scramble to my feet, and run. Pain licks up my left ankle
with every step.

Odd, I never miss a landing.

I hear Rain’s pounding steps behind me,
feel that flicking angry aura burning at my heels. I should easily be able to
outrun him, but my legs are suddenly heavy and slow. I make a hairpin turn,
only I don’t. I’m on the ground with no memory of falling. My bare hands sink
into slushy snow.

Something vibrates in my pocket. Tarren.
He’s in my pocket. He can help.

I can’t figure out how to get up. My
legs aren’t working. Maybe they are molasses. I should be afraid. I know this.
I try to make myself be afraid, but I’m strangely giddy at the prospect of
dying.

Tarren, oh yeah. I grasp for the phone,
but my hands seemed to have doubled in size. The world starts doing a fast
pirouette around me. I have the phone in my hand. A voice barks on the other
end.

“I’m shot,” I explain to Tarren. This
causes more barking. I’ve made him mad. I always make him mad. Why can’t I ever
un-mad him? It doesn’t matter anyway, now that I’m dying.