Leaping (12 page)

I try to look serious as well, but
I can’t help thinking how many cookies, sweets, and kisses Gabe has squeezed
out of Carmen using the cancer bit. We’d had to make some excuse for his wasted
frame when we visited Lo at the beginning of the year, and Gabe has certainly
been milking that little lie ever since.

Carmen’s eyes finally land on me,
and I watch the flair of orange distaste rise in her aura even as her ruby lips
spread into a smile. “Buffy,” she says, pronouncing it “Boofy.” “It is good to
see you.”

I nod and put on my own smile. I’ve
never been able to figure out exactly why Carmen dislikes me, so I just play
along like we’re besties. “You too, Carmen. You look great.”

“Ah,” she waves her long, manicured
nails at me. “I am old and forgotten.”

“I could never forget you,” Gabe
jumps in immediately, dialing up his charm to gag-inducing levels. “Who else is
going to fatten me up and catch me up on my favorite telenovelas? We just gotta
talk to Lo and Troy first.”

Carmen brightens and nods, and I
wonder again how Gabe seems to know exactly what to say to every person he
encounters. Maybe it’s because half his lies are actually truths. He does care
about Carmen, and he could have just as much fun making cookies or watching telenovelas
with her as trading My Little Pony stickers and saliva with April and Teresa
last night. His heart is a huge gate flung open to everyone...Well, almost
everyone.

“I’ve been thinking of some really
good insults for Lo,” Gabe confides as we walk around the back of the house,
past the pool and bronze lion statues to the guest house Lo has converted into
his lab.

The palm scanning lock is still in
place, so we knock.

“Password,” a muffled voice demands
from within.

“Skunk farts,” Gabe responds
immediately in an official voice.

I turn and give him a look that
says,
Why can’t you even attempt to play nice?

“Denied,” the voice shouts back.
Gabe beams. Mission accomplished.

“Come on, open up,” I call out.
“It’s…”

The door swings open, and Tarren
stands on the other side, his face flat, clearly not amused.

“Hey man!” Lo grumbles behind him
and crosses skinny arms across his chest. “That lock is on there for a reason.”
Since I first met him last year, the sixteen-year-old has grown at least an
inch, and his thin body is beginning to fill out and finally catch up to the
deep bass of his voice. He’s also added at least four studs to the visible
parts of his body, including a new black lip ring since we stopped by last
month.

Tarren’s expression is hard. The
light plays across the flat, shiny skin of the scar along his jaw making it
almost gleam. I catch his eyes, and I’m looking for something. The lie. Tammy.
Now that I know it’s there, I want to see it clearly in his gaze. Guilt.
Deceit. But all I see are blue-gray orbs focused with equal intensity on me.
For a moment I wonder if he knows about Gem, if he’s searching for the same
deceit in my gaze that I want to discover in his. Gem came into our motel room in
Peoria when Tarren was injured, and he entered Tarren’s mind to help ease the
nightmares. Could Tarren have remembered?

No, he was too drugged. Impossible.

“Bad news?” Gabe says, recognizing
that Tarren has set his expression at quantum-level seriousness. 

“New mission,” Lo says, and his
mouths turns up into a slimy smile that makes me wonder again if he isn’t just
a touch evil, crazy, or both.    

“We need to take an angel,” Tarren
says. His eyes don’t waver from mine. “Alive.”

Maybe a rogue ice storm just swept
through Las Vegas, because a deep shiver goes all the way through my body at
Tarren’s announcement. Gabe gasps like Tarren’s words are a sucker punch.

“What the fuck do you need a live
angel for?” he manages to sputter.

“For experiments,” Lo says with an
unsavory grin.  My gaze travels through his churning, colorful aura to the line
of iron-on skulls dancing down the front lapels of his black lab coat. Lo would
look a lot more badass if it weren’t so obvious how hard he was trying.

“What kind of experiments?” I ask,
even though I’m probably sure I don’t want to know. My mind immediately drums
up an image of rabbits huddled in cages, their faces smeared with eye makeup. It’s
the kind of picture my old college roommate, Lucy would post on Facebook along
with an ardent, all-caps message demanding the destruction of this or that
makeup firm or puppy mill.

 “You’re a sick little shit, Lo,”
Gabe says. “We take ‘em out. We don’t cut ‘em up, least not when they’re
alive.”

I watch the swirls of orange
lighting up in my brother’s aura. Gabe hates that Lo often requests the bodies
of our enemies for dissection, even though Tarren claims that it’s provided
worthwhile insight. I wonder if all that angel slicing and dicing helped Tarren
create the Prism. The thought immediately curdles in my mind. 

Did he really make the mirrors
for me…or for Tammy?

I shake the thought away and ask, “What
are you working on?”

“The cure?” Gabe jumps in
immediately. “Is this about the cure?” His aura spikes.

Tarren’s mouth tightens, and that’s
all the answer I need.

Lo’s sly grin stretches wider. “Something
like that,” he says. That touch of sadistic charm comes straight from his
father, Leo “The Lion,” a semi-famous boxer and full-on abusive parent who
juiced himself into angeldom to grab an edge in the ring. Lo spent a lifetime
never measuring up to his father’s brutal expectations until the day Leo
decided his son needed to make the angel transition. That also happened to be
the day Tarren and Gabe finally caught up to him. They ended Leo’s piss poor
parenting reign and his life, and a weird, dark partnership was born between Lo
and Tarren.

 “Christ, you guys don’t get to do
this; have all these secrets,” Gabe says, his aura jumping like crackling
flames.

Tarren’s words are even and
controlled. “We’re just hypothesizing,” he says. “It’s too early to make
predictions or promises.”

Tarren excels in the art of muddy
non-answers. He doesn’t lie exactly, but his truths have a way of leading you
farther away from where you want to go. I watch his aura closely, trying to
penetrate his strong control. He’s being especially careful right now, keeping
his emotions held in a firm grip.

No angel cure. I already know this.
It’s one truth Tarren did let escape in Peoria nine months ago when a
tranquilizer dart stripped away all the layers of his subterfuge. The words
were barely a whisper as he slipped into unconsciousness, but I heard them.
Not
a cure.

I tune back into the argument. Gabe
flings his arms up and down as he speaks, and his aura dances around his frame
like crackling fire. Poor brother. He believes, despite all previous experience
with Tarren, that the decision has not yet been made. That we all have an equal
say.

I look at Tarren. “Will this help
us win the war against them?” I ask.

Lo opens his mouth, but Tarren
answers first. “It might.”

I think of the Google Map on Gabe’s
computer, the one he uses to track suspected angels. The map is a pin cushion
of colored beads. Red for suspected angels. White for potential victims. Black
for clipped wings. I envision all those clouds of white beads that spread
across our country. Sometimes they cluster around a black bead, sometimes they
lead to a black bead in a long, meandering trail across multiple states. Thousands
and thousands of white beads collected over the years, and new ones added every
day. Each one of those white beads was a name. A life. A precious smile. A
hidden dream. Arms that once embraced brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers,
husbands, wives, children, friends.

 “What’s the plan?” I ask.

***

The drive to Scottsdale is quiet.
Tarren’s hands are firm on the wheel at 9 and 3 like he memorized a driving
manual. Probably did. The cloudless sky stretches like blue infinity in front
of us. Gabe lounges morosely in the back seat, throwing dagger eyes at his
brother every so often just to remind us all how pissed he is. He hasn’t
cracked a single joke in the two hours we’ve been on the road.
A new record,
I think.

Tarren’s plan is thorough and
reasonable…and about as secure as walking on a balance beam seeded with
landmines. Our normal protocol of taking down an angel at a distance with a
sniper rifle presents specific risks that we can account for and address. Nabbing
a live angel, stuffing him into our car, driving him four hours back to Lo’s
lab, and keeping him in a non-homicidal mood the entire time is a whole
different box of crazy crackers.

Tarren’s entire plan pivots on
keeping the angel unconscious throughout the ride, but as confident as he
sounded in rolling out his scheme at Lo’s house, I know his doubts are as sky
high as my own. He once told me that trying to account for an individual angel’s
metabolic rate was nearly impossible. Make the tranquilizer dose too high, and
the angel will take a permanent nap. Put it even a hair too low, and their
metabolism will chew through it before we even get out of Arizona.

My thoughts fill with images of a
rabid, super-powered, aura-sucking creature joy-riding back with us to Las
Vegas. I look ahead and see a familiar billboard coming at us in the distance.
Jet Armstrong, attorney at law, grins from the large billboard. Dazzling white
teeth contrast sharply with his orange tanned skin. A huge headline scrawled
across the board announces in all caps, “IF YOU’VE BEEN INJURED, YOU DESERVE
JUSTICE!” Jet Armstrong seems to thrust his face out at the trickle of oncoming
cars, screaming at them that, “JET ARMSTRONG FIGHTS FOR YOU!”

 “Captain Strong Arm,” I announce
to Gabe. He looks up and squints at the billboard still half a mile off. We land
on this stretch of the 93 a couple of times a year. In May, Gabe pointed to the
billboard and said, “Jet Armstrong, soulless attorney by day, Captain Strong
Arm villainous accident-creator by night.”

It was so stupid, one of the
endless pointless things that come out of his mouth, but I’d giggled, and that
was all the encouragement Gabe needed. For hours afterwards, he told me the
tale of Captain Strong Arm who buzzed around the city of Laughlin on his
gleaming black moped leaving mild chaos in his wake to generate more clients
for his daytime persona. Now, every time we pass the tacky billboard, Gabe has
new stories of Captain Strong Arm pouring puddles of milk in grocery store
aisles, knocking bannisters loose in apartment buildings, and dropping vases on
people’s heads at Pottery Barn. It’s all part of his devious and mad plan to
sue every living person on earth.

I stare at Jet Armstrong’s slicked
black hair as we pass the billboard in silence.

“And what happens if we do bag this
angel and bring it back to Lo?” Gabe’s words burst out of him as if they’d been
heating up to a boil the past two hours.  “What’s he going to do with it? We’re
not torturers, Tarren. We’re not the bad guys.”

I expect Tarren’s hands to tighten
on the wheel, for the lines to crease across his forehead with a frown, but nothing.
He seems utterly still. A statue.

Is Tammy alive?
I silently
think to him. The question has been trying to tear itself out of me this whole
trip, but I can’t voice it. Not in front of Gabe. Not while we need to focus on
the mission.

 “We will keep the angel under anesthesia,”
Tarren says in that exasperatingly calm voice, “and when the test is over,
we’ll euthanize and depose of it.”

Euthanize. He actually uses the
word
euthanize
, like angels are just unloved dogs that needs to be
gotten rid of to make room for more adorable and adoptable options. I sigh and
try not to think about all the hues of gray dripping off our hands. Gabe is
right. This is bad, but if a bad act helps us save innocent lives, isn’t the
tradeoff worth it?

Something grabs my attention. A
single streak of red pierces through the muddled blue of Tarren’s aura. He’s
trying to hold back his emotions, but that little red flicker tells me of his
unease, that he finds this endeavor as distasteful as the rest of us. But
necessary.

Still human, at least,
I
can’t help but think.

Tarren will never turn away from a
hard decision, but it eats at him. I know it does. Sometimes I wonder how many pieces
of his soul he can bargain away before he loses it altogether.

***

In the waning afternoon, Scottsdale
is a tidy, cheerful town, seemingly painted in just three different shades of
beige. Something about its neatness and sameness weirds me out.

“Here,” Gabe says, and Tarren pulls
into an expansive parking lot. A Target looms at the center of the strip mall,
like the mother ship protecting all the small stores nearby. I stare at the
Target longingly and mentally draw up a list of all the essentials that I need.
I ran out of body wash last week and have been rationing my shampoo like a
miser. I’m down to four tampons, and my only good sports bra came out blotchy
pink in the wash, because Gabe decided to throw a bright red Flash t-shirt into
my load. Whoever thinks the life of a vigilante is romantic can quickly be
cured of that notion by spending two hours at the
Clean Bubbles
laundromat
in Fresno at 10 PM on a Friday night.

We’ve barely slowed down the past
two months, and I can’t imagine my brothers are in better shape. Gabe hasn’t
worn a matching pair of socks in three weeks. Tarren, of course, looks
perfectly put together, short hair combed forward, cream-colored long-sleeve shirt
hugging his broad shoulders. Maybe his underwear is fraying, though I wouldn’t
bet on it.

“Over there.” Gabe nods to a small
shop on the outer arm of the strip mall. A fastidious sign reads, “Morrison
Accounting.”  Gabe claims this is our nearest angel, but he was sparse on the
details.

“What do we know about this guy?” I
ask him as I watch well-dressed people walk into Target with impressive
purpose. Is there something in the Kool-Aid here in Scottsdale? A woman wearing
pearls in her ears walks through the automatic doors, and I think about the
times I threw my hair into a scrunchy as my only concession to propriety before
running to Target during my college years.

“Remember that guy, Trevor out in
Jersey?” Gabe says with a snicker in his voice.

Hard to forget Trevor out in Jersey
even if I didn’t have a razor sharp memory. He was a tall drink of water,
muscled in that way only two daily hours in the gym can manufacture. He did
finance up in New York and fed his dollars into a wardrobe that could have
floated us for a year per outfit. We’d tracked him from his office in a glassy skyscraper
to….

 “Remember him, Tarren?” I ask
innocently and watch my brother’s face. Trevor had checked his breath on his palm
before sauntering into a jazzy gay bar in Manhattan. We’d been forced to act
when he emerged towing a drunk, young heartthrob behind him.

Tarren’s grimace tells me that
night is still firmly etched into his memory. While the two guys made out, a
glow crept through Trevor’s hands, and as he brought them close to the human,
Tarren’s bullet took off the top of his head. I can call up the impressively
raw scream the human let out as he stumbled back and ran into the bar before
any of us could get a tranq in him. It’d been all that we could do to drag our
dead angel away before six hot guys, all practically dipped in their t-shirts, rushed
out to investigate.

It’d been Gabe’s idea, of course,
to have Tarren waiting for them in place of Trevor. My brother had at least a
passing resemblance to the angel before Trevor lost half his head. Watching
Tarren attempt to simper and smile at the crowd of men in his tight black
mission outfit was as hilarious as it was painful even with Gabe’s whispered suggestions
through our connected earpieces. I’m pretty sure Tarren still hasn’t forgiven
his brother even though it did leave everyone confused enough that the police
weren’t called. Also, bonus, Tarren walked away with two phone numbers despite
his painful awkwardness.

“You ever call any of those
numbers, Tarren?” Gabe asks, matching my innocent tones.

“How does Morrison relate to Trevor?”
Tarren asks coolly.

“Blood. They’re cousins. I cracked Trevor’s
email off his iPhone. Theodore is the one who infected him. I’ve had Theo on my
list for a while, but we just haven’t been in this part of the country in a few
weeks.”

The way Gabe tells it, just a few
years back, it’d take him a month of hard work just to find a single angel.
Sometimes weeks stretched between missions. Now today, we have a backlog of bad
guys, and the wait list just keeps getting longer and longer.

“You could have sent him to The
Totem,” I say without considering my words.

“You think?” Gabe’s voice is
musing. “Not a bad idea. I’ve got sixteen names we need to cross off. Maybe it’s
time to outsource.”

I look to Tarren, expecting an
immediate denial. I think a little secret part of him only lights up when he
can say no. But his eyes go far away and he remains quiet for a few long beats
while his brain processes, spinning through thousands of factors and concerns.
Finally, his eyes refocus.

“I don’t like it,” he says and then
his voice softens, “but if we leave angels on the board, people die. It might
be reasonable to contact the Totem…since they have already decided to risk
their lives.”