Hallowed (4 page)

“Okay . . . ,” I agree. “What are the other rules?”

“That’s it,” she says.

“Oh. One per stone tablet,” I joke.

“Ha. Ha.” She turns back to Christian. “What about you? You’ve been awfully quiet this whole time. You’ve got to swear too.”

“No, thank you,” he says politely.

She leans back in her chair in surprise. “No, thank you?”

“To the rules. I won’t go blabbing about this thing to my buddies on the ski team. But I tell my uncle everything, and I’m going to tell him about this.” His eyes seek mine, pin me. “It’s stupid not to communicate what you know to the adults. They’re only trying to protect us. And as far as the no-secrets zone, I can’t agree to that. I don’t even really know you guys, so why would I tell you my secrets? No way.”

Angela’s speechless. I find this kind of funny.

“You’re right,” I say. “We ditch the rules. There are no rules.”

“I think it’s great, though,” he says as a way of soothing Angela. “Meeting and finding out what we can do, trying to figure things out. Count me in. I’ll be here, whenever, until it snows and then I have ski team, but maybe then we can move this to Sunday afternoons, which would work for me.”

Angela recovers. She even whips up a smile. “Sure, that’s doable. Probably better for Jeffrey’s schedule, too. Sundays. Let’s do Sundays.”

There’s a moment of uncomfortable silence.

“Okay then,” Angela says finally. “I think this meeting is adjourned.” It’s almost dark when I leave the theater. Storm clouds are brewing overhead, churning like a grumbling stomach. I guess I should be grateful for the rain, since the storm put out the fires, which in the end probably saved people’s lives and homes. It’s only weather, I remind myself, but sometimes I wonder if this particular weather’s been sent to bother me personally, a punishment, maybe, for not doing my job, for failing at my purpose, or some other sort of ominous sign.

I try for a quick, casual good-bye to Christian at the corner, but he puts his hand on my arm.

“I still want to talk to you,” he says in a low voice.

“I have to go,” I manage. “My mom will be wondering where I am. Call me, okay? Or I’ll call you. One of us should definitely call the other.”

“Right.” His hand drops away. “I’ll call you.”

“I gotta run. I’m late.”

And then I’m off in the opposite direction.

Coward
, says the nagging voice inside my head.
You should talk to him. Find out what he
has to say.

What if he says we belong together?

Well, then you’ll have to deal with that. But at least you won’t be running away.

I think it’s more of a brisk walk.

Whatever.

I’m having an argument with myself. And I’m losing.

So not a good sign.

Chapter 3

Other People’s Secrets

Mom comes out of her office the moment she hears me step through the front door.

“Hey,” she says. “How was school?”

“Everybody talked about my hair, but it was fine.”

“We could try to dye it again,” she suggests.

I shrug. “It must mean something, right? God wants me to be blond this year.”

“Right,” she says. “You want a cookie, blondie?”

“Do birds fly?” I scamper after her into the kitchen, where, sure enough, I smell something wonderful baking in the oven. “Chocolate chip?”

“Of course.” The buzzer goes off, and she puts on an oven mitt, takes the sheet of cookies out of the oven, and sets it on the counter. I pull up a stool on the other side of her and sit. It feels so normal it’s weird, after what’s happened, all the drama and fight-for-your-life stuff and serious soul-searching, and now . . . cookies.

The night of the fire I came home assuming we’d have this big tell-all, and everything would be out in the open now that the stuff from my vision had happened. But when I got home, Mom was asleep,
asleep
on the most important night of my life, and I didn’t wake her, didn’t blame her because we were both, at the time, so literally fried, and she’d been attacked, almost died and all. But still. It wasn’t exactly how I thought my purpose would go.

It’s not like we haven’t talked. We have, although mostly it was a debriefing of what’s already happened. No new information. No revelations. No explanations. At one point I asked,

“So what happens now?” and she said, “I don’t know, honey,” and that was it. I would have pressed her about it, but she kept getting this look on her face, this bleak expression, her eyes so full of pain and sadness, like she’s so incredibly disappointed in me and how my purpose turned out. Of course she would never come right out and say that, never tell me that I’ve screwed up everything, that she thought I would be better than that, that she thought I’d make the right choices when my time came, that I’d prove myself worthy to be called an angel-blood. But the look says it all.

“So,” she says as we wait for the cookies to cool. “I thought you’d be home a while ago.

Did you go to see Tucker?”

And already I need to make a big decision: to tell her about Angel Club, or not tell her.

Okay. So I think about how the first thing out of Angela’s mouth when it came to rules was not to tell anybody, especially the adults, and then I think about the way Christian refused, just like that, said that he tells his uncle everything.

Mom and I used to have that. Used to. Now I have no desire to share this stuff with her, not about Angel Club, not about the weird recurring dream I’ve been having, not about how I feel about what happened the day of the fire or what my true purpose might have been. I don’t want to get into it right now.

So I don’t.

“I was at the Pink Garter,” I say. “With Angela.”

Not technically a lie.

I brace myself for her to tell me that Angela, while full of good intentions, is going to get us all in deep trouble someday. She knows that any time spent with Angela is time spent talking about angel-bloods and Angela’s many theories.

Instead she says, “Oh, that’s nice,” and uses a spatula to slide the cookies onto a wire rack on the counter. I steal one.

“That’s nice?” I repeat incredulously.

“Get a plate, please,” she tells me, and I do. Then, as I’m sitting there with a mouthful of chocolatey goodness, she says, “It was never my intention to shelter you from other angel-bloods forever. I only wanted you to live normal lives for as long as possible, to know what it’s like to be human. But now you’re old enough, you’ve been through your visions, you’ve had a glimpse of the evil in this world, and I don’t think it’s a bad thing to start learning what it truly means to be an angel-blood. Which means hanging out with others like you.” I wonder if she still means Angela, or if now she’s talking about Christian. If she assumes being with him is my purpose. Not very women’s lib of her, I think, if she believes my entire purpose on this earth is to hook up with some guy.

“Milk?” she asks, then goes to the fridge and pours me a glass.

And this is the point where I finally get the guts to ask her. “Mom, am I going to be punished?”

“Why?” She reaches for a cookie. “Did you do something today I should know about?” I shake my head. “No. My purpose. Am I going to be punished because I didn’t, you know, fulfill it? Am I going to hell or something?”

She halfway chokes on the cookie, then takes a quick sip of my milk.

“That’s not really how it works,” she says.

“How does it work, then? Will I get a second chance? Is there anything else that I’m going to be expected to do?”

She’s quiet for a minute. I can practically see the wheels turning in her head, deciding how much she’s going to tell me. This aggravates the crap out of me, of course, but there’s not a lot I can do about it. So I wait.

“Every angel-blood is given a purpose,” she says after what feels like an eternity. “For some that purpose manifests itself in a single event, a singular moment in time where we are led to be at a specific place at a specific time, to do a specific thing. For others . . .” She glances down at her hands, choosing her words carefully. “Their purpose can involve more.”

“More?” I ask.

“More than a single event.”

I stare at her. This has got to be the strangest conversation any mother and daughter has ever had over milk and cookies. “How much more?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. We’re all different. Our purposes are all different.”

“Which was it for you?”

“For me . . .” She clears her throat delicately. “It was more than one event,” she admits.

Not good enough.

“Mom, come on,” I demand. “Don’t leave me in the dark.”

Inexplicably, she smiles this tiny smile, like she finds me funny. “It’s going to be okay, Clara,” she says. “You’ll figure it out when you’re supposed to figure it out. I know that’s frustrating to hear. Believe me, I know.”

I swallow the rising craziness that’s churning in my stomach. “How? How do you know?” She sighs. “Because my purpose lasted more than one hundred years.” My mouth drops open.

One hundred years.

“So . . . so you’re saying that it might not be over?”

“I’m saying that your purpose is more complicated than simply completing a task.” I jump to my feet. I can’t keep sitting down for this. “You couldn’t have told me this, oh, I don’t know—
before
the fire?”

“I can’t give you the answers, Clara, even if I know them,” she says. “If I did it might change the outcome. You just have to trust me when I say that you’ll get the answers when you need them.”

And there’s the look again, the sadness. Like I’m disappointing her right this minute. But I also see something else in her luminous blue eyes: faith. She still has faith. That there’s some kind of plan for our lives, some kind of meaning, or direction, behind all of this. I sigh. I’ve never had her kind of faith, and I’m afraid I never will. But I find that even though I obviously have some issues with her, I do trust her. With my life. Not only because she’s my mother, but because when it really counted, she saved it.

“Okay,” I say. “Fine. But I don’t have to like it.”

She nods, smiles again, but the sadness doesn’t quite leave her face. “I don’t expect you to like it. You wouldn’t be my daughter if you did.”

I should tell her, I think, about the dream. See if she thinks it’s important, if it’s more than a dream. If it’s a vision. Of my possibly continuing purpose.

But right then Jeffrey comes through the door, and of course he hollers, “What’s for dinner?” since food is always the first thing on his mind. Mom calls back to him, starts bustling around preparing a meal for us, and I’m amazed at her ability to switch off like that, to make it feel like we’re any other kids coming home from our first day of school, no heavenly purposes set for us, no fallen angels hunting us, no bad dreams, and Mom is just like any other mother.

After dinner I fly over to the Lazy Dog to see Tucker.

He’s surprised when I tap on his window.

“Hi there, handsome,” I tell him. “Can I come in?”

“Absolutely,” he says, and kisses me, then quickly rolls across the bed to close the door. I crawl through the window and stand, looking around. I love his room. It’s warm and cozy, neat but not too neat, a plaid bedspread pulled haphazardly up over his sheets, piles of schoolbooks, comics, and rodeo magazines strewn about his desk, a pair of gym socks and a balled-up hoodie in the corner of the slightly dusty oak floor, his collection of cowboy hats set in a line across the top of his dresser along with some old green army men and a couple fishing lures. There’s a rusty horseshoe nailed over his closet door. It’s so
boy
.

He turns to look at me, scratches at the back of his neck.

“This isn’t going to become one of those creepy situations where you show up at all hours of the night to watch me sleep, is it?” he asks playfully.

“Every moment I’m away from you, I die a little,” I say in return.

“So that’s a yes, then.”

“Are you complaining?” I ask, quirking an eyebrow at him.

He grins. “Nope. Definitely not complaining. I just wanted to know so I can start wearing more than my boxers to bed.”

That gets a blush out of me. “Well, don’t—uh, change anything on my account,” I stammer, and he laughs and crosses the room to kiss me again.

We spend a very nice few minutes hanging out on his bed. Nothing heavy, since Tucker still has this notion that since I have angel blood in my veins he should try to keep my honor intact. For a long time we simply lie there, catching our breath. I lay my head on his chest, feeling his heart thumping beneath my ear, and I think for the thousandth time that he is without question the best guy on the planet.

Tucker takes one of my hands and curls and uncurls my fingers around his. I love the texture of his hands, the calluses along his palms, evidence of all the hard work he’s done in his life, the type of person he is. Such rough hands, but he’s always so gentle with them.

“So,” he says out of the blue, “are you ever going to tell me what happened the night of the fire?”

Moment over.

I guess I knew this question was coming. I was maybe hoping he wouldn’t ask it. It puts me in this terrible position, knowing other people’s secrets, especially when those secrets are all tangled up with mine.

“I—” I sit up, pull away from him. I seriously don’t know what to say. The words catch in my throat. This must be what it’s like for Mom, I think, keeping things hidden from the people she loves.

“Hey, it’s okay,” he says, sitting up next to me. “I get it. It’s top-secret angel stuff. You can’t tell.”

I shake my head. I decide that I am not my mother.

“Angela’s forming a club, for angel-bloods,” I say as a start, even though I know this isn’t what he asked me.

This is so not what Tucker thought I was going to say. “Angela Zerbino’s an angel-blood.”

“Yes.”

He snorts. “Well, I guess that makes sense. There’s always been something off about that girl.”

“Hey. I’m an angel-blood. Are you saying there’s something off about me, too?”