by Chloe Garner
“What would you think of that?” he asked.
Somehow it didn’t bother her that she was still holding his hand. He smelled of engine oil and sweat and aged leather, and she wanted to bury her nose in his shoulder.
What was wrong with her?
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. He grinned, bright teeth in the dark.
“No,” he said. “Maybe I would have, but I wasn’t her type and frankly she wasn’t mine.”
“And here everyone keeps telling me how I’m just like her,” Lizzie said.
“Do they?” Trevor asked distantly, then bumped her shoulder with his.
“How am I different from her?” Lizzie asked.
“I don’t like the angels that come across all blonde-in-a-white-dress. I like a girl who can take a hit and dish it back. Darker, you know.”
“So it’s the way I look?” Lizzie asked. He looked harder at her.
“Does it matter?”
“No,” she said. It was true, and it sounded like the truth. “I just want to know.”
He nodded, then licked his lips and put his free hand up to her neck, pulling out her hair band and raking his fingers through her hair once, then holding her hair away from her skin and putting his cheek against hers, his mouth against her ear. She might have stopped breathing.
“It’s the way you feel, when you come in a room,” he said, his voice husky, low. “Like everyone there should be afraid of you.”
She swallowed. She had stopped breathing.
He closed his hand around her hair and tugged at it once, then let go and stepped away from her, watching her eyes with an intensity that almost frightened her.
Almost.
He motioned with his head, and they started walking again.
“So… from the first day?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he answered. “From the first day.”
He squeezed her, and a shock went up her arm.
She eased away and crossed her arms, hugging herself.
“Suddenly I don’t trust myself with you,” she said and he laughed.
“That’s okay. We can walk anyway.”
She swallowed again, still trying to figure out what had happened. This morning he’d left her, angry, because she’d called him crazy, and tonight…
“Are you always moody?” she asked.
“Not as much as the rest of them, but yes,” he said. “Is that okay?”
He wasn’t looking for approval or permission. He wanted to hear her say that she acknowledged it.
“I understand,” she said, and he nodded, putting his hands in his jacket pockets. He had an easy stride tonight, loose and confident without the agitated energy from earlier in the day.
“You feel better because of the war at the school,” she said. He laughed up at the sky.
“I do,” he said. “They got away from us, but damn we put a good dent in them.”
“Those words don’t go together,” she said and he grinned.
“No, they don’t.”
“I asked Robbie to explain the… what, the rules to me, tonight, and he wouldn’t do it.”
“No, I expect he wouldn’t,” Trevor said.
“Will you?”
“If you want me to,” he said. “It’s pretty dry, underneath all of it.”
“But you can?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said.
“It’s not a big secret?”
“Is this a test, Lizzie?”
“Maybe.”
“Ask me anything,” he said. “I’ve never slept with Sybil, but I have slept with Cory.”
“Ew,” she said.
“Sybil bites,” he said confidentially, and she shoved him.
“Shut up.”
“I mean it,” he said. “Ask me anything.”
She considered.
“All right. How did Lara become the angel?”
He sighed.
“That’s all the way to boring,” he said, shrugging in his jacket and resettling his hands. “She’s always been an angel. They don’t exactly tell me the rules, but we’re all born what we are. I was born a demon, she was born an angel, and Robbie was born a hooligan.”
“But Robbie says I won’t become an angel unless I believe you’re telling the truth, that it’s all real,” Lizzie said. He nodded.
“You put it away. And apparently they didn’t need you, so they let it be. Until now.”
“Put it away,” Lizzie said.
“That’s between you and your own self,” Trevor said. “I’ve been able to see them since I can remember. I’ve known what they do the same way you know what words mean. It’s just always been there. The fact that you can’t see them isn’t something I understand.”
“And if I were to suddenly believe, then I’d start seeing them, too?” she asked.
“Dunno,” he said. “I’m just making this all up.”
“Gee,” she said, and he laughed.
“We don’t carry union cards, Lizzie. All I know is what I’ve seen.”
“How did you find out about… demons and angels and all of that?”
He nodded.
“There’s a good question. I was in Germany and I met some kids who were messing with the furlings. First people I’d ever met who could see them. Their demon was a good guy, well, good enough, and he told me most of what I know today about them and us.”
“And then what?” Lizzie asked. He shrugged.
“Life went on. He told me I’d need an angel, eventually, but I was still early and they hadn’t put me anywhere, so I might as well keep wandering like I’d been doing. I thought I might never meet any more hooligans, but when you know how to read the furlings, the hooligans are easy to find. And so are angels.”
He glanced at her.
“Do demons… and angels… What do they do?” Lizzie asked.
“I spawn furlings, the angel absorbs them.”
He said it so matter-of-fact, like it was something she should have figured out by now.
“Spawn,” she said. He nodded. She hoped he’d explain it better than that, but he didn’t seem inclined, so she pressed him.
“What does that mean?”
“It means they start with me,” he said. “I have some control over them, but not a lot. Takes a lot of focus to not leave them in big packs. They like being in packs, but you can kind of see where it’s going to happen and try to prevent it.”
“And what do they have to do with what happened at the school?” she asked.
They’d reached the park, and he led the way across the open space to a small stand of trees, where he sat down. She sat across from him.
“They got into a pack,” Trevor said, wrapping his twined fingers around his knees and leaning back against the tree trunk. “They’re dangerous in packs.”
“And what does that have to do with the war?” Lizzie asked. He twisted his face to the side.
“It’s hard to explain if you can’t actually see it happen, but there are two ways to deal with furlings. You play with them and distract them and keep them from getting involved with each other, or you try to get to the chaos before they do, and you kind of steal it from them and starve them. It’s pushing and pulling. We pull, they push. The ones on Lara’s team. My side got too much momentum up and we had too many furlings there and Robbie’s side didn’t steal enough of their energy, and they ended up… They blew up, and there are no words for that. And once they’ve blown up, they fall on something, and then you just want to be out of the way.”
There was no mania to it, no agitation, no insecurity about whether or not Lizzie would understand or believe him.
“Why can’t Robbie just tell me this?” she asked.
“I told you before,” Trevor said. “Because no one has ever believed him, especially back when it didn’t make any sense. Even after all this time, I bet he has doubts if it’s even real.”
“You’re saying it’s my fault,” she said.
“Broadly,�
� he said, leaning back and putting his hands behind his head. “The entire medical profession that you represent. Plus, you know, the flips and being able to see things that everyone else doesn’t.”
“But why are you okay?”
He grinned at this.
“Massive, unrepentant ego,” he said. “And for Lara, it was an overwhelming sense of well-being. That’s what she called it, anyway. Her parents believed her. My dad just didn’t care. Now,” he said, holding up a finger. “The real question is whether I’m the demon because I’m an egomaniac, or if I’m an egomaniac because I’m the demon.”
She looked at him blankly and he grinned again, sitting back.
“What else?”
“If there’s no one to absorb… furlings…”
He nodded.
“They stack up. Robbie and the rest of them can kill a few here or there, but they need someone who can thin them out a lot faster than that.”
She shook her head.
“You’re telling me that there have to be that many angels all over the country, all over the world, to keep things under control. That doesn’t make sense.”
“Not at all,” he said. “I’m telling you that there has to be an angel for every demon. If there were too many angels, the furlings would start to be too rare, and they wouldn’t have any fun. They’d kill the angels. But they like having things to go after. A war zone has almost no furlings in it, because the chaos is no fun. The people are starving them. So they naturally desire a balance, one to one.”
“Maybe you should try to get rid of them all,” Lizzie said. “If they’re the ones responsible for random bad things happening.”
He gave her a sideways smile.
“I’ve never worried about it, not the way you would. I try not to cross streets and I stay away from hospitals, but the world needs chaos. It needs exploding chemistry rooms. That was awesome, though, wasn’t it?”
Yes.
“No.”
He grinned at her.
“It was. The world needs chaos and destruction because otherwise nothing would ever get better.”
“Creative destruction?” she asked. “That’s how you live with it?”
“Lara worried about it,” Trevor said. “And we talked a lot. She was one of my best friends…” He rolled his head to the side. “I spawned the furlings that killed her.”
“Robbie said it wasn’t your fault. If even Robbie doesn’t think…”
“No, it was her own damned fault,” he said. “She wouldn’t leave Robbie. She told me they were trying to get her move on, and she wouldn’t do it.”
“What?” Lizzie asked. He drew a semi-ragged breath and looked at her again, just a shadow against a tree in the shaded moonlight.
“Hooligans live in a pack. Both sides of the fight, they stick together because that’s how they work. They’re stationary. Trying to make Robbie move would tear him up. Put him back where he was when Lara met him. Angels and demons, though… Demons just wander. Angels build structures, and the furlings don’t like it when they get too effective, so they move them around. You take one out and you put a new one in, and no one gets an upper hand. And they had been signaling to her that it was time to move on. And she wouldn’t go.”
“They killed the angel,” Lizzie said, soft, remembering that first day.
“They did indeed,” Trevor said.
“It was a congenital defect in a blood vessel in her brain,” Lizzie said.
“That they put there,” Trevor said. “Like the flaw in the gas line at the classroom. Or the loose soil over top of the tree roots. Or that piece of gravel that the kid went over on his skateboard. They don’t play by our rules.”
“And you just go along with it?” Lizzie asked. “They kill your best friend and you don’t do a thing?”
He sat forward, a bright shaft of moonlight hitting his eyes.
“Tell me what to do. Tell me how to get her back, or how to stop being what I am. How to kill them. Tell me one single thing I can do.”
Guilt.
No matter how real his nonchalance was most of the time, the guilt was there.
He really did believe he’d killed Lara.
She wanted to argue with him. Tell him it couldn’t have been his fault. That he was compensating for a lack of control in the world by making random things his own personified fault - it was classic - but she could see his eyes.
And she believed in him.
That was why Robbie believed, too. And maybe Lara. Or maybe Lara had been more of a partner in crime than an unwitting accomplice.
He sat back again, snatching her hand from her knee and turning it over to trace his finger along her palm. It made her brain itch, made her need to pull her hand away and at the same time demand that he not stop.
“It’s the facts of our world,” he said. “That’s why Robbie wasn’t surprised when it happened.”
“Doesn’t mean I have to accept it,” Lizzie answered and he laughed, darkly.
“What else do you want to know?”
“Do you really think I’m going to be an angel for you?”
“Not for me. But yes.”
She shook her head.
Participating in this mania.
But she was, wasn’t she?
She let her hand drop away from his fingers, and he didn’t chase after her.
“I can’t even believe I’m out here with you,” she said. “Sneaking around like a teenager in the middle of the night.”
He looked at the sky.
“Isn’t quite midnight, yet. The night is still young.”
“What do you do, when you aren’t being a demon?”
There was the sound of a laugh.
“What do you do when you aren’t being a woman?”
“Is it that integral to your identity?” she asked.
“It is.”
She didn’t know how to help him.
She didn’t know that she wanted to.
She definitely knew he didn’t want help.
She wanted to turn around and lean against him and watch the night go by, listen to the noises of the night insects, the air as it stirred through the trees, his breath.
That alarmed her, with the sentinel part of her adult mind. She was tumbling into something that was wildly out of control, full of touch and chemical and a lack of consideration, and it was taking up more and more of her breadth of attention.
She wanted to be talking about Robbie, about what was going on in his world and how she could help him first stay stable and second, a new goal, help him to transition out of this crutch phase into a true awareness of reality.
That’s what she should have been doing.
Instead, there was this dare in front of her to really ask him anything.
“Who was your first girlfriend?” she asked, impulsive, ignoring her better sense.
“A girl named Elise, in Paris,” he said. “I was nineteen.”
“Did you love her?” Lizzie asked. He laughed, looking away with a sort of dismissive humor.
“I didn’t speak enough French to love her,” he said. “We had a great time, though.”
“Have you ever loved anyone?” Lizzie asked. Now he was looking at her again, and she wished she could read his face in the dark.
“Now that’s one I didn’t see coming,” he said. “How old are you, Lizzie?”
“Thirty-one,” she said.
“Have you ever loved anyone?”
By the time Robbie had gotten stable enough that she didn’t have to police after him just to make sure he wasn’t sleeping in a ditch, she’d had her job and it had taken over her life.
She hadn’t had a serious boyfriend since high school.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Why is that?” he asked. “Don’t say your job, or that you were busy. How has a woman as passionate about the people she cares about as you managed to get this far into life without falling in love?”
She scooted
away.
“I don’t know,” she said.
He came after her, rolling out over his knees and crawling, his face catching light again and his eyes inches from hers, looking at her like he could read her, if he tried hard enough.
“You do,” he said.
“No I don’t,” she said. “It just never happened. I never met him.”
“You think there’s just one?” he asked, and she shook her head. She was nowhere near that romantic-minded.
“Then why?” he asked again, slowly dropping his forehead to rest against hers.
“Because Robbie,” she said. He nodded.
“Because Robbie. You’ve only got one.”
He’d turned it around so neatly she hadn’t had time to anticipate it. He sat back down, cross-legged, out in the moonlight, and started picking grass and biting it before he threw each blade away.
“There’s always a Robbie,” he said. “Or a Sybil. Or a Lara.”
The way he said Lara, soft, almost lilted. So many people had pronounced it Loh-ra, but he always, always said ‘lah-ra’, the way Robbie did.
“Did you love her?” Lizzie asked. He twisted his head away and spat again.
“I told you she was too frail for my taste. But she wasn’t an angel, when she got here. I taught her, myself. Everything. And now I have to start over, because they killed her.” He blinked at her. “She was a beautiful person, under all that posturing fluff.”
Lizzie had never known Lara to posture, but she didn’t say so. She hadn’t really known the woman at all.
“I get it,” Lizzie said, and he nodded.
“You would. That one, you would understand.”
“Do I still get to ask you anything?” Lizzie asked.
“Sure. Anything you want.”
“Where do you sleep at night?”
“Do you want to see?” he asked, scrambling to his feet and offering her a hand.
“I do,” she said.
She walked back down the sidewalk next to him, close enough to touch, but silent and apart. He didn’t seem to be there with her, and she didn’t have anything she could think of to say to him to break the silence. Suddenly, he tipped his head back and howled. All around them, dogs answered, barking and howling back, and people yelled. Yelled at the dogs, yelled at him. He barked and howled again, and the dogs that were late to join in did so enthusiastically, and he laughed, then grabbed her hand as lights came on.
