by eden Hudson
Our limo passed a fleet of news vans parked at the Dark Mansion’s huge front doors and pulled around to the Permanent Residence Wing. The barracks to the west of the mansion had been reduced to smoking rubble. A few foot soldiers with flashlights sifted through the ashes, probably searching for anything they could salvage.
I wanted to be suspicious, to tell myself that this was more acting for the benefit of anyone watching, but there weren’t any news crews back here. Worse, whenever a foot soldier’s face was momentarily illuminated, the expression was stony, flat.
The limo stopped. Kathan climbed out first, then helped Tempie out. I scooted to the door.
Kathan held his hand out to me. I stared at it.
“It doesn’t bite,” he said.
Duh. He’s just trying to be polite. I took his hand, but tried not to lean too heavily on it as I got out of the limo.
Kathan’s skin was a degree away from blistering. My brain tried to play up the differences between him and Tough—burning versus freezing; cool, calm understanding versus a fiery temper ready to explode; the constant, effortless air of seduction versus the laughing, mangled attempts at sexiness that had been so perfect.
I pulled my hand back.
Even as hot as it was outside, the lack of Kathan’s warmth was immediately noticeable. My fingers felt cold. I stuck them in my shorts pocket.
Then I realized the foot soldiers over by the barracks had stopped searching the rubble. They were standing perfectly still, watching us. One foot soldier shook out his wings angrily. Another one spat as if he was trying to get a bad taste out of his mouth. All of them were glaring.
At me?
It made sense. Less than twelve hours ago, I had helped their mortal enemy blow up their home. Now I was being welcomed into the fold as if I hadn’t done anything at all.
I took a deep breath and followed Kathan and Tempie into the mansion. I shivered, but not from the sudden blast of air conditioning.
Even after the door shut, I could still feel the foot soldiers’ black eyes boring into the back of my neck.
The thick red carpet in the Permanent Residence Wing muted our footsteps. Tempie’s hands seemed to be magnetically drawn to Kathan’s fly. His hands were pretty busy, too, working their way under the hem of her barely-there dress.
I kept my eyes on the carpet so I wouldn’t catch a glimpse of anything I couldn’t unsee.
Another foot soldier met us at the door of Kathan’s rooms. There was a possibility it was Fatigues—the foot soldier who had escorted me to Kathan the time I came to the Dark Mansion with Motocop—but I couldn’t say for sure. Maybe it was because I was exhausted, but all the panty-melting muscles, obsidian feathers, and perfectly shined combat boots were starting to look alike to me.
Kathan detached his lips from Tempie’s throat just long enough to say, “Show Modesty to her rooms.”
The foot soldier gave him a short nod.
“Have a good night, Modesty,” Kathan said over his shoulder as he lifted Tempie onto his hips. She locked her ankles behind his butt and pulled his mouth back to hers.
“Uh, thanks,” I said, pretty sure they weren’t listening. “You have a good night, too.”
The door slammed behind them.
“I think they’re about to,” the foot soldier said.
But when I looked up, his smirk was cold and angry.
“Right this way, Modesty.” The way he said my name made it sound like an insult.
I opened my mouth—who knows what idiotic thing I thought I was going to say—but the foot soldier spun hard on his heel and strode off before I could make a sound. I jogged to catch up.
Now that felt familiar. Maybe this fallen angel was Fatigues.
“Is this your job?” I blurted as I fell into step beside him. “Uh, I mean, do you work inside the mansion as part of your rank?”
Possible Fatigues glared straight ahead. “I’m security.”
“Like a guard? Do you rotate shifts or—”
Possible Fatigues stopped in his tracks and turned on me. His wings snapped open to their full span like the hood of a cobra flaring. The tar covering his feathers seemed to absorb the light in the hall.
If my throat hadn’t locked up, I probably would’ve screamed.
“Let’s clear something up right now, doll face,” he hissed, leaning in close. “I don’t want to be your friend. Being in any proximity to you makes me want to rip your belly open, pull your intestines out, and shove them down your throat. But I assume that in doing so I would contract some sort of disease from touching the Whitney-screwing whore who helped that psycho blow up my home and send my commanding officer to Hell.”
My backpack bumped the wall. I’d been backing away from him without realizing it.
“I-I-I didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” I squeaked.
“No, of course not,” Possible Fatigues said. “You fell in with the wrong crowd, made some bad calls. You just wanted to help. You didn’t stop to think what might happen to anybody else.”
“I—”
“Save the excuses,” he said, taking a step back and folding his wings. “Kathan gave the order not to touch you. Me? I follow orders.”
The extra physical space reminded me to breathe. I inhaled. Exhaled. Tremors ran through my arms and legs like chills.
“I do now, anyway.” As he turned and started walking again, a corner of Possible Fatigues’s mouth lifted in a half-smile. “But not all of my brethren learned their lesson the first time. That’s why I’m here. I’ll make sure no one forgets their orders and rapes you bloody while you sleep.” He was yards away from me by then, with his long legs eating up more floor every second I stayed frozen, but I heard him snicker. “Or, I don’t know, anything else someone might allegedly be planning. That’s my job, doll face. I’m your security.”
Ryder
The best thing about living way out in the sticks is, when you need to, you can take off running from your back door and cut a straight line through woods and back pastures to town without ever hitting blacktop. We ran for a good ten minutes through the trees before they cleared off and we came to a barbwire fence over a creek.
Colt stopped long enough to shove that fiery sword back into Hell, then he slid down the draw and ducked under the lowest-hanging wire like he did this all the time.
He knew where he was going.
“Hey, Sunshine,” I wheezed. You don’t get a lot of exercise in Heaven, and honestly, I wasn’t in that great of shape before I died. Half a bottle of Southern Comfort a night will do that to a guy. “Where we headed?”
Colt jogged up the other side of the draw.
For a guy who was supposed to be watching his brother’s back and helping him figure shit out, I was getting left in the dark an awful lot. Almost like I wasn’t his own mental construct.
Colt stumbled and shook his head like he was trying to shake off a punch.
Wait. Shit. Not a mental construct. Divine intervention. God was like, “Go help your brother. Git ‘er done,” and I went. I went to help my brother because that was what I did when I was alive. I protected him. Always.
Colt bent over and put his hands on his knees.
I took a step closer to him. “Like, remember that time Rian pulled us over and you started to freak out, spouting shit about lines and black noise, and I shot him before he could hear you? You remember that, Sunshine, don’t you?”
Colt was talking to himself, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. I grabbed a fistful of his shirt and pulled him up so that he had to face me.
“In school, when you had that flashback and stabbed Cris, and that teacher—the hot one who was trying to work off her student loans—she Tased you? Who convinced Sissy to let us drop out? That’s right, this motherfucker right here.”
It almost seemed like he was listening to me, so I kept on talking.
“And when Mikal caught me trying to blow the barracks to Hell? I laid there while she hacked me up and I screamed and pissed myself and
cried like a baby for Mom, but I didn’t give you up. I didn’t tell Mikal what you figured out about the black noise showing you the lines of power because I’m your brother.” I smacked my chest. “The real fucking deal, not some made-up, imitation shit. I protect you. I did it then, I’m doing it now.”
I don’t know how much of it he heard, but he stopped jabbering like a crazy person, anyway.
“Who came through for you, Sunshine? Who always comes through for you?”
Colt nodded.
“Good talk.” I gave him a shove. “Now, get us moving again before I have to kick your ass.”
Tough
I wasn’t too sure where I was when I woke up. A floor. Not at the house, though. Our floors were peeling linoleum downstairs and smashed-down carpet upstairs. A little on the shitty side, but Harper was pretty anal about keeping it vacuumed, so at least it was clean. The carpet I was laying on had a little give to it, like there might be padding underneath, which was definitely not a feature of our house.
Someone was yelling. Two someones.
“—obviously can’t trust one goddamn word that comes out of your mouth—”
“You drag me all the way back to this dump of a town to do your dirty work and then— Jason, don’t!”
Jason?
Jason Fucktard Gudehaus. Mitzi’s husband.
I opened my eyes just in time to read the words Louisville Slugger. Then the bat smashed my nose out the back of my head. I rolled onto my hands and knees, trying to get up, but my left arm and leg wouldn’t do what I told them to. Jason must’ve dented something important in my brain.
Where the hell was that vamp healing when I needed it?
The next swing snapped the bone in my upper arm in half and knocked me into a wall. The drywall caved in around me.
Somebody should’ve convinced that dumbass to go out for baseball instead of football. Maybe then Halo’s high school sports teams wouldn’t have been such a joke.
“You fucker!” Jason yelled.
Except it wasn’t his voice he was yelling with. It was mine.
Holy shit, is that really how I sound? I’d made recordings of myself singing before he stole my voice, but I had never recorded myself talking. I sounded like a little bitch.
Turned out I didn’t have long to be insecure about it because the maggots started chewing through the front of my face, eating away the damaged tissue. Bone shards sucked themselves out of my smashed nose and forehead and snapped back together with little firecracker pops.
Over the noise of my arm snapping itself back together, I heard Jason cock back for another swing.
Finally the vamp speed kicked in. I took off from the crouch, sprinted toward him. I dropped my shoulder for the tackle.
But instead of slamming into Jason’s gut and hopefully doing some irreversible internal damage, a delicate hand with long, fake fingernails grabbed me by the throat. Mitzi. She threw me into the nightstand, cracking another couple of my ribs.
“Stop,” Mitzi said.
The bat whiffed. I got my eyes open just in time to see Mitzi grab it mid-swing. Jason grunted and jerked the bat, trying to rip it away from her.
“Stop it!” she yelled.
“You said!” Jason was wheezing and his voice—my voice—had gone high-pitched. His face was red and crumpled up like he was about to cry. “You said you would… But you’re…”
“Fucking him again. Yeah.”
I started to get up.
“Don’t you dare, Tough,” Mitzi said.
I would have gone after Jason again anyway, but the vamp healing picked that second to kick in. While my newly broken ribs popped back into place, I dropped back against the wall, held my stomach, and tried not to think too much about all the moving going on under my skin.
Mitzi twisted the bat out of Jason’s hands.
“You said you were going to stake him,” Jason whined in my voice.
“I know.” She rolled her eyes. “But I didn’t say I wouldn’t fuck him first. Seriously, babe, I have needs. Where am I supposed to get it? From you?”
He gulped. Sniffed.
I scrubbed my hand through my hair and looked around the room for my hat. It would’ve been great to have some clothes on. Or to be anywhere else. Back at the house playing PKR with Harper and Jax. I could’ve probably even made this whole thing sound funny if I tried. But Jax was dead, Harper hated me, and the dumbass I wanted to blame for it all was about to bawl because his trophy wife was screwing me again.
But she was just doing it because I was the only guy in town who would put up with her psycho-bitch bullshit. I was the only guy as screwed up as she was. Sex was all I was good for, so she might as well.
My lungs started sucking wind like my life still depended on it. The walls felt like they were closing in on me. The mattress—which had gotten thrown across the room during Round Four of the hate-sex—got bigger and bigger, until it took up my whole field of vision.
I had to get out of there. Fuck getting revenge on Jason. Fuck banging Mitzi. Fuck everybody. I had to get out.
I got up, grabbed my jeans from off the TV. My shirt was too bloody and tore-up to salvage, so I left it. My boots were sprawled out by the door, and my John Deere hat was on the doorknob. I didn’t bother putting anything on, just took it all outside with me. I climbed up in the truck and sat with my clothes on my lap.
I wished I could be gone. Just gone. Not Heaven or Hell—just never having existed at all. Things would’ve been different without me. Better. Jax would still be alive. Him and Harper might be married by now. Maybe Mom would even still be alive. Maybe Dad would’ve gone with her to pick Ryder up from after-school detention that day. Dad wouldn’t have hidden in Mom’s flipped-over van like a little bitch, bleeding and shaking while Mikal stomped Mom’s skull in. He would’ve stopped Mikal. Everything would’ve been different.
I squeezed my eyes shut as tight as I could and rested my forehead on the steering wheel. I didn’t even feel like hitting anything.
Just let me be gone.
But I wasn’t even praying to anybody anymore. Getting made had cut me off forever.
My whole life I’d felt like I was missing something that everybody else had, that direct connection to God that everybody but me said they could feel. Even Mom, who’d been more like me than anybody else in our family. Mom used to say if you held really still when you hurt the most, you could feel God inside of you, fixing things. But I’d never felt that. Not once in my life.
Well, I sure as hell could feel something now—I could feel where He’d been ripped out. It was nothingness. Cold fucking emptiness.
A shiver rolled down my neck.
Better enjoy it while it lasts. Somebody shoves a stake through your heart, it’s going to warm up real fast.
Ryder
Colt didn’t slow down or give any indication of stopping again until we tore through the last strip of trees and out into a bean field. Up ahead, I could see the lights at the very top of the Ferris wheel shining over the businesses on the square.
“Tell me we’re not just going to waltz into town,” I said.
Colt took off across the field.
I groaned. “Aw, fuck me.”
At the edge of town, he stopped, checked every which way to see if anyone was around or flying overhead. Then he jogged across the highway and ducked into an alley. Brick buildings loomed on either side of us. It would’ve been a great bottleneck if someone wanted to drive us into an ambush.
The alley came out smack-fucking-dab on the square. While Colt scanned the area for potential threats, I stared at the deserted carnival. The hair on my arms stood up. Looked like everyone had disappeared in the middle of the Armistice Celebration and now the place was lit-up and empty forever.
Somebody had taken the initiative and hung a sign up on the Ferris wheel. Actually, it looked like a bunch of bedsheets that had been sewed together and spray-painted on. A couple were even different colors—light blues and pinks
instead of white.
TOURISTS GO HOME
HALO is CLOSED
by ORDER of the INMATES
“What do you think that means?” I looked over at Colt. The whole side of his shirt was soaked. “Shit, Sunshine. You got shot.”
He peeled the hem of his shirt up and looked.
“It’s just a graze.” He went back to staring out at the square. “You think it’s a trap?”
“I think you’re losing a shitload of blood, that’s what I think.”
“We’re almost there.” He sounded halfway lucid, but that was the problem with nutcases. Sometimes they were really good at hiding the crazy.
“Where? Almost where? Do you even fucking know?”
“Don’t ask.” He hung a right out of the alley and started running again.
And I saw it—where we were going.
“Great,” I said. “Just great.”
The lights inside the bakery were on when we got to the door. Through the order window behind the counter, I could see into the kitchen. The vamp who ran the place was reaching into the oven for something.
Colt pushed some buttons on the electronic deadbolt’s keypad. The numbers flashed red. He stared at it for a second, then he knocked on the glass.
The vamp turned, a pan full of scones in her hand. When she saw Colt standing at the door, she dropped them.
Tough
The vamp hearing picked up a heartbeat approaching the passenger side of the truck. I looked out the window.
Scout. She opened the door and hopped in. Heat and girl sweat and some other smell I’d never noticed while I was alive swirled around her like a cloud. The new smell was kind of spicy, but not like food-spice. More like the time Mom took me with her to the dime store over in North Fork and they had all those potpourri brooms and fake flowers.
“Where have you been?” Then I guess Scout realized why I would be naked, sitting in the truck in the motel parking lot because she said, “Oh.”
