Branded (Fall of Angels)

by Keary Taylor

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

   

  Despite the late night, the boys took off just before seven in the morning.  Alex came down to say good-bye before they left, his face looking all too guilty.  He tried to offer to stay home with me but I didn’t even let that conversation begin and insisted that he needed to go.

  Even though I missed having Alex at home, it was nice to have the quiet slowness of being at home alone.  Having a break from pretending things were fine and hiding just how horrible I constantly felt was nice.  I needed some time to think and I desperately needed to get caught up on that laundry I was supposed to do the day before.

  As I stuffed the first few loads into the washer I tried desperately to come up with a plan of action.  I wasn’t coming up with much.  How was one supposed to handle something like this?  I didn’t know what to look for nor did I know exactly what this angel was after.  It was terrifying to think that the feather had been just under my bedroom window.  I felt violated and horrified that I had been being watched without knowing it.

  After several hours the only solution I had come up with was to be on the lookout and had the silly temptation to install a security camera pointed at my window.  This seemed like a ridiculous idea but it was all I had for now.

  I had just switched my second to last load into the dryer when the phone rang.  I dashed down the hall and picked it up on the fourth ring.

  The woman announced herself as the case worker for Sal at the institution.

  “We were wondering if you would be able to come in this afternoon and discuss the options for Miss Thomas?  Maybe in about two hours?”

  I couldn’t see any reason I could not come up.  I had been feeling pretty good that morning, almost back to normal except for the throbbing in my head that never seemed to fully go away.  “Sure, that would be fine.”

  The woman gave me the address of the facility and the phone number in case I had any problems finding it.

  As I gauged what time I needed to leave, I decided that perhaps I would head out early and pick up a few things I had been too embarrassed to ask Alex to grab for me.  It would probably do me good to get out and about.  I had practically become a hermit the last few weeks, despite the commitment I had made to do exactly the opposite and go back to normal social activities.

  I dressed comfortably, wanting to make this as easy on myself as possible should I start to feel under the weather again.  After checking that I had everything I needed, I headed out to the garage.  I had to stop and admire my car again as the light hit it when the garage door creaked noisily up.  It really was a nice looking car now.

  Of course the time when I really needed to get out and Alex was not around for a backup, my GTO would decide not to start for me.  It refused to turn over and immediately I realized the battery was dead.

  With a frustrated sigh, I went back inside the deserted house and called Alex.  It went straight to his voicemail. 

  Tears threatened to spill over as I dropped to the floor.  I was so overwhelmed.  There was just too much to deal with.  An angel had escaped, I needed to take care of Sal, I was sick, and now my car was dead and Alex was gone.

  I closed my eyes and counted backward from ten, feeling as if I were fighting off a panic attack.  Perhaps I really was, I’d never had one before.  It wasn’t a fun emotion.

  When I felt I had calmed down enough to think straight, I considered my options.  I could call the institute and tell them that I couldn’t make it today but that was about my last resort.  I really needed to go see Sal.  It had been a while. 

  If it had been summer, there might have been the option of catching a bus, but as it was just the beginning of March they wouldn’t be running for at least another month.

  My stomach gave another one of those sickening turns when I realized what my only other option was.  Cole.  Sometimes life was just plain spiteful.  In both times of immense desperation he had been my only option.

  I considered just calling and asking if he could jump my car but I realized it would be just as fast to walk over to his house and ask him in person.  And it actually was a nice day outside.

  Something I hadn’t considered when I decided to walk was that outside was so open and exposed.  I found myself constantly looking over my shoulder as I walked the short distance.  For all I knew the angel could be lurking behind anything, just waiting to jump me and shove a red hot iron into the back of my neck.

  Okay, my imagination was getting away with me.  Maybe I really was going crazy.

  Still, I couldn’t help but breathe a slight sigh of relief when I got to Cole’s doorstep.

  I was surprised to see that there was no doorbell, considering the fact that the house was so new.  There was only an antique looking door knocker.  It was kind of charming.  I found myself warming to the idea.

  I soundly knocked on the door four times and waited, my palms sweating as they twisted around each other.  This was about the last thing I wanted to do right now but I wasn’t going to be a wuss and I wasn’t going to hide from Cole when I shouldn’t have to.  He had to know how things were.  We could still be friends though.  He had no other choice.

  As I waited, I could hear sounds coming from inside and after listening hard I realized what it was.  Screamer rock music.  I chuckled slightly at this.  I wouldn’t have pegged Cole as the type to listen to that kind of stuff.

  I gave another five hard knocks on the door and waited for longer than it should have taken him to get to the door.

  Feeling anxious to get out of the exposed outdoors but not anxious to walk back home and call Cole, I wandered to the window to the right of the door, standing on my tip-toes to look in.  This window looked into the well-decorated living room but it seemed completely deserted.  The windows practically shook from the vibrations of the music.

  I crossed back in front of the door to the window to the left.  This window was just slightly higher than the other because it was a little smaller and I had to climb up on a decorative rock that was placed just right to see into the window.  This window shook even more dangerously than the other did and I saw the large and rather expensive looking stereo sitting on a stand next to it.

  I had to cup my hands around my eyes to see through the glare and it took me a second to realize what the room was that I was looking into.  It was not a large room and I figured it was an office.  A large bookcase that was mostly empty spanned one wall and the wall opposite of the window had a large desk pushed up against it.  Seated at it was Cole.

  He was crouched over something and after a moment I realized it was a very old looking leather bound book.  He seemed to be researching something, checking it against the computer that was set directly in front of him.

  I paused in knocking on the window, not wanting to disturb him as he seemed to be working so intently on whatever it was that was in that book.  I had to wonder how he could concentrate on anything when the music was blaring so loud.  And beside the noise level, it all just sounded like angry screaming to me.

  After a few moments, he sat up straight in his chair, lifting his arms high above his head to stretch.  He then dropped his hands behind his head and leaned back as far as he could without tipping it.  He stared at the computer screen for a moment then ruffled his hair as if to scratch an itch, or perhaps how a man might do when he is frustrated with the task at hand.

  His hair was rather long and at the moment looked slightly shaggy.  It was nearly as dark as if ink had been spilled on it and contrasted sharply with the white lines on the back of his neck.

  My body froze as this last thought registered.  If my vision hadn’t been so bizarrely enhanced I probably would have missed the lines on the back of Cole’s neck.  I pressed my face against the glass and stared wide eyed as he brought his hair completely off his neck, pinning it with his hands against his head as if trying to cool it.

  Cole’s scar was the same design as my own but it was different in two ways.  Min
e was almost always an angry red but that was probably due to the constant re-branding I experienced.  Cole’s was a nearly white color as if the brand had been pressed into his skin long ago and had been given a long time to heal.  The second difference was that it seemed to be almost shadowed.  As if the iron had been pressed just briefly into his neck and he had pulled away before it had been pressed into it again, that time making its mark deep and sure.

  I inched my face away from the glass slowly, my breath coming in shallow, short gasps.  I knew I had seen this specific, unique mark before.  A faint echo sounded in the back of my memory but I couldn’t clearly recall where I had seen it.

  One thing was for sure though.  I knew Cole’s brand was not the same as mine and Emily’s for a reason.  He had not come about his the same way we had.

  Before I realized what I was doing, my feet were back on the ground, springing across the Earth as fast as my legs would allow me.  Tears sprang from my eyes and leaked onto my cheeks but I didn’t even notice.  The panic that was rising in my system clouded my mind and the only thing I could think to do was to run and picture in my mind the spot I was running to.

  I nearly tripped and rolled down the hill as I went directly to the door that led into my apartment.  It took me longer than it should have to finally yank the door open.  I made double sure to lock it when I was safely inside.

  It took me maybe ten bounding steps to get from the back door and into my bedroom.  I stood with my hand on the door knob to my closet for several long moments before I could work up the courage to open it.

  The folder was buried in the back of my closet, along with several boxes of old memories I would have almost rather forgotten.  I pulled it out and flipped on the light in the closet.  The space was big enough that I could sit on the floor and set the folder in front of me. 

  My heart was racing in a scary way and my head throbbed with a greater speed than it had ever before as I opened the folder and stared at the drawings that gazed back up at me. 

  When I was younger I remembered the nightmares in much sharper detail.  Nothing escaped the eyes of a child, though no child’s eyes should ever have to see the things I saw.  I had been a skilled drawer from a very young age and to help me cope with the fear it seemed to help if I drew the things I saw.  I had hoped this would help my parents to understand the things I was going through, to make them believe.  They had terrified my mother, these images of beautiful men and women with the powerful wings.  She made me stop drawing them.  And as I stopped drawing them my recollection of the details faded.  They all became just a fuzzy recollection up until the last few trials.

  I shuffled through the sheets of beautiful faces until I came to the one I was looking for.  My body froze into stone and my ears started ringing till I could hear nothing else but the pulsing of the blood rushing all too fast through them. 

  On one side of the sheet was a perfect duplicate of the shadowed scar I had just seen.  On the other side was an exact likeness of Cole’s devastatingly beautiful face. 

  I knew that face well.  It was the same face that had branded me hundreds, perhaps thousands of times.  The missing leader of the condemned.