Angel Burn (13 page)

For a second all I could do was gape at him. “As in New Mexico, the state,” I said.

“Yeah. The only person I can still trust is there.”

“And what does that have to do with me, exactly?”

He gave me a look like he couldn’t believe I was really this stupid. “Because if there’s even a chance that the angels are right about you, then I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

“Oh, you’re not,” I said, my voice shaking with disbelief. “Well, great. Do I get a choice about this?”

His leather jacket gave a faint squeak as he shrugged. “Sure. You can go home and get killed, and put everyone you love in danger. Go for it.”

My chin jerked up as we stared at each other. “I don’t even know you,” I gritted out. “If you think I’m going to drive all the way across the country with you, you’re insane.”

The only sound was the traffic on the highway. Alex’s dark eyebrows were drawn together, his jaw tense. “How psychic are you?” he demanded. “How do you do it? What do you need?”

I shrugged, trying to hide my sudden apprehension. “I  . . .  just need to hold someone’s hand.”

He thrust his hand at me. “Here. Go on.”

I shook my head, not moving. “I can’t do it like this. I’m too upset.” Alex kept his hand in the air between us, his blue-gray eyes a challenge. Finally, my mouth tight, I took his hand in my own. It was warm, firm, with calluses on the bases of his fingers. Stupidly, heat flickered through me. Annoyed with myself, I ignored it and closed my eyes, trying to clear my mind.

Jumbled images started flashing past: A camp in the desert, with barbed wire and a burning sky. His brother, taller and broader than him but with the same eyes. Killing angels — the hard, deadly joy of it. Aunt Jo’s house, with Alex sitting outside it in his car. He really did work for the CIA. I saw him sensing something strange about my energy — something not angelic, but also not human. Then he was inside, watching me as I slept. I caught my breath sharply as I viewed myself through his eyes, lying curled up on the sofa under our old afghan. There was an angel floating peacefully above me with her head bowed — beautiful, radiant, serene. She had no halo; her wings were folded gracefully behind her back. As Alex moved slowly around our coffee table, keeping his gun on her, her face came into view.

It was me.

With a cry, I dropped his hand. There was a pause.

“Well?” said Alex.

I hugged myself, not looking at him. He wasn’t crazy; his energy had felt clear and strong. The truth of everything he had said, every word, beat through me.

Along with the memory of my wings, gently stirring the air.

“What does this mean?” My voice came out high, frightened. “These  . . .  angel things that you’ve seen about me. How can I be part angel, unless  . . . ” I stopped as if the breath had been punched out of me. When I was around eleven, I went through this phase where I really wanted to know who my father was. Since Aunt Jo had no idea, I had asked Mom, over and over, whispering the question to her and trying to break through her dreamworld.
Mom, who was my father? Mom? Do you remember? Who was my dad?

And once, and only once, she had answered me. Smiling, her eyes had focused briefly on mine as she’d whispered, “He was an angel.” I’d given up trying after that.

I felt the blood drain from my cheeks. The image of my father that I’d seen once when I tried to read Mom, the man who’d creeped me out so much he made me shudder. He’d had the same strange, compelling eyes as the angel that had stood on my doorstep. And now I remembered: amid the pretty rainbows of Mom’s mind, there had sometimes been an angel, too, standing in her old apartment and smiling at her. An angel with the same face as my father. I had thought she was just hallucinating.

I could hardly breathe. I clenched my skirt, bunching the material in my fist.

“Unless what?” pressed Alex.

“You — you said that angels can cause insanity,” I burst out. “Do they ever — have relationships with humans? I mean —”

“Yeah,” he said, giving me a piercing look.

“What about their eyes? Are they —?”

“Weird,” he said tersely. “Too intense. Too dark sometimes. You feel like you can’t look away from them.”

“Oh, my God,” I whispered. My skirt twisted and writhed in my fist.

“Your father,” said Alex, his mouth grim. “I’m right, aren’t I? He’s one of
them.
”

Panic gripped me, quickening my breath. “I — I don’t know. I never knew him. . . . I only saw him once, when I tried to read my mom. But his eyes were just like that. He — he broke my mother’s mind; my aunt said that she was normal before him.” I stopped, the words dying coldly in my throat.

Alex sat staring at me, his expression battling between
I knew it
and something like disgust. “A half angel,” he muttered finally. “Great.” He started the car again and merged back onto the highway, punching the accelerator hard. A few seconds later, we were edging up to ninety.

The world was pitching around me like a hurricane. I knew it was true, even if I didn’t want to believe it. I was a half angel. My father had been one of those
things;
he’d destroyed my mother.

“This should be impossible,” said Alex in a low voice. “If angels can breed now —” He broke off, his hands tightening on the wheel. After a pause, he blew out a breath. “Anyway, they think you’re a danger to them, and I can’t take the chance that you’re not. So — what’s it going to be? Are you coming with me, or do I have to follow you and try to keep you from getting killed?”

Remembering the sensation of my wings opening and closing, I thought I might throw up.
Don’t think of it.
Don’t think of it.
I let go of my skirt and shakily smoothed my hand over it. “Who is it that you want to go see?”

“A guy called Cully,” said Alex. His dark hair had fallen onto his forehead again; he shoved it back without looking at me. “He used to be an AK. Angel Killer. He’s the only person I can trust now that they’ve taken over Project Angel.”

What was Project Angel? It sounded like something out of a cheesy action film. But then, so did being shot at in a parking lot. I licked my lips. “Will — will those people really go to my house? What happens if they do? What if they hurt Mom and Aunt Jo?”

He gave a curt shrug, glancing over his shoulder as he took the turnoff for the interstate. “I don’t know. They’ll be searching for this car before they do anything else. But like I said, if you do go home, you’ll die, and so might your family. That’s the best I can tell you.”

He sounded so brusque, as if it didn’t matter to him in the slightest. “And you think this  . . .  Cully person might have some answers.”

“He’s the only person in the world who might.”

I fell silent.
Mom.
I envisioned her sitting dreaming in her chair, her eyes filled with distant, beautiful things. I thought of Aunt Jo’s house, of the lavender swaths of fabric draped across my bedposts. And then I saw the screaming crowd at the Church of Angels, felt their hatred again, surging toward me in a dark sea. The beautiful winged being as it swooped after me, shrieking — the barrel of the rifle, pointing straight at me. Maybe Alex didn’t seem very friendly, but he had saved my life; I knew it without a doubt. If he hadn’t been there, I’d be dead now.

A shiver ran sickly through me. He was right: I couldn’t go home. I’d die if I did; I’d put Mom and Aunt Jo in terrible danger. In my mind, Aunt Jo’s house suddenly looked very small — already distant, moving away from me forever. If I couldn’t go home, then where could I go? I couldn’t put Nina in danger, either. There was no place that was safe; those people weren’t going to be happy until I was dead.

A half angel.

The only sounds were the humming of the Porsche’s engine and the slight whisper of wind rushing past. I hugged myself. If this person Alex knew really did have some answers, then he was someone I seriously needed to meet.

The words hesitated in my throat. I couldn’t believe that I was actually saying them.

“OK,” I whispered, so softly that I could hardly hear myself. “I’ll go.”

FOR THE NEXT FEW HOURS, neither of us spoke. I stared out the window at the passing trees and farms, hardly able to believe this had happened. Eventually the traffic got busier and the highway widened to six lanes, and I woke up out of my daze and realized that we were on the New Jersey Turnpike, heading into New York City. Almost as soon as I thought it, I could see its famous skyline through my window to the right, spiking up in the late-afternoon sun. Alex took the George Washington Bridge across the river, paying the toll in cash. Skirting north of Manhattan, he drove us into the Bronx. After a while, we were in a neighborhood of crumbling buildings and overflowing Dumpsters.

I cleared my throat. “I thought we were going to New Mexico.”

Alex didn’t even glance at me. “Not in this car; they’ve seen it.” His voice was flat. Obviously, he was as thrilled about going to New Mexico together as I was.

Pulling into a small, run-down shopping center, he parked the Porsche and got out. I followed him, wrapping my jean jacket tightly around myself. Nervousness prickled at my scalp as I took in the graffiti on the buildings, the broken glass on the ground.

Alex opened the trunk. There was a black nylon bag inside; he unzipped it and pulled out a bulky envelope, which he tucked into his inside jacket pocket. Then he went around to the front, swept his hand under the driver’s seat, and took out a small metal box. He shoved it into the nylon bag; I caught a glimpse of jeans and folded T-shirts inside. He put in a few things from the glove compartment, too, and then zipped the bag shut again and slung it over his shoulder.

“Come on,” he said shortly.

Shoving down my irritation at having orders barked at me, I started to tell him that he’d left his keys in the car — and then I realized that that was the idea. Feeling sort of stunned, I followed him across the parking lot with its cracked asphalt, glancing back over my shoulder at the gleaming black Porsche.

“Do you have a cell phone?” he asked as we passed a Dumpster. I nodded, and he said, “Let me have it.”

“Please,”
I muttered. I dug in my bag for my little blue Nokia and handed it to him. He pulled a sleek-looking phone out of his own pocket and tossed them both into the Dumpster. They made a clattering noise at they hit the side.

I stared at him. “But —”

“They can track them.” He started off again without checking to see if I was following. “They’re probably already inspecting your account, to see if you’ve called home. Don’t. Not for any reason. We can’t risk it.”

I started to protest, but the words faded in my throat. This was real. People were actually trying to kill me. “Yeah  . . .  OK,” I said. I trudged along beside him, my thoughts whirling. Aunt Jo and I had never been bosom buddies, but she was still going to be worried sick when I didn’t come home tonight. And Mom  . . .  would she even notice? The thought of that felt even worse somehow.

We came to a subway station, and Alex jogged down the cement stairs. He bought us both a fare card, handing mine over without looking at me. I wanted to know where we were going but didn’t really feel like talking to him, any more than he seemed to want to talk to me.

We rode the crowded subway in silence. Alex sat leaning back with his knees slightly apart, tapping his fingers on his jean-clad thigh. Studying him in the darkened window opposite, I took in the slant of his cheekbones, the tense line between his dark eyebrows. My gaze lingered on the shape of his lips. He really was completely gorgeous, I realized reluctantly.

I almost jumped as our eyes met in the darkened window. For a second Alex’s face was unguarded as he glanced at me, and I caught a glimpse of something — concern, maybe? — that made my heartbeat quicken in surprise. Then the shutters snapped shut again, and he frowned and looked away, crossing his arms over his chest. Remembering his expression of disgust in the car earlier, I felt cold suddenly. I shifted as far away from him on the seat as I could.

When we got to Lexington Avenue, Alex stood up without saying anything. As we emerged out onto the streets again, the sun was setting, clouds bleeding red against the sky. We were in another run-down neighborhood, though not nearly as bad as the one in the Bronx. Glancing up at some shops, I saw that the signs were in both English and Spanish. “Where are we?”

“Spanish Harlem,” said Alex, speaking to the air in front of him. He was striding along, so that I had to hurry to keep up.

Even so, he didn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular, just wandering from street to street. After a while we came to a residential area lined with old brownstones and parked cars. Here in the city, the evening still had a tinge of summer to it, and people were sitting outside on their front steps, talking and laughing. Rock music throbbed through the air, something with a heavy beat and warbling Spanish lyrics. I stared around us, taking it all in. I’d never felt so conscious of my blond hair in my life.

“Bingo,” murmured Alex. Following his gaze, I saw an olive-green Mustang Boss parked on the side of the street, maybe a ’69 or ’70. It was sort of beat-up, with a dent on the hood and another on the passenger-side door, but it was still a classic, with hard, muscular lines. There was a sign on it:
$1200 OBO
.