The A-Word (27 page)

“Holy shit,” Ryan said.

“I told you,” I hissed at him. “I thought you believed me.”

“I did,” Ryan said. “But I—”

If he said something else, I didn’t hear it. Because I was
too busy gawking. Bo and Terry had vanished. Gone. Poof. Like the power going out in a hurricane but silently, without the cracking and zapping sound. My breath seized. My pulse leapt. Like Casey! But hey
—Terry
wasn’t an angel.

“Jesus!” Ryan hollered and it sounded like he was mimicking my brother, who did not choose this moment to return.

I looked around wildly, glass crunching beneath my feet as I turned this way and that. The lab guy henchmen—
Were they in on it? Or just duped into helping?
—whirled frantically, too. Then they bolted for the exit, scrabbling over the crunchy floor.

“Stop,” said Amber. She did not shout. She did not gesture. Just said “stop,” calm as can be. They stopped.

She squinched up her eyes like Casey had done at the ball field, skin glowing deep golden, something simmering inside her.

“You never saw this,” she said. “There was a storm. Things happen.”

Mags and Ryan and I exchanged silent looks of awed understanding.
Damage control
. My eyes flashed back to the lab henchmen. They were staring at Amber like she had just imparted the secrets to the universe.

“Walk away,” Amber said. “It’s been a weird day. Shit happens.”

The lab guys shuffled off. My mouth hung open—just a little—as I watched them go. Even the security guy appeared calm and collected.

“
You
can do that?” I asked Amber. She didn’t even look at me as she strode toward the elevator.

“Oh Jenna,” she said as she passed, so quiet I almost couldn’t hear her. “Of course I can.”

“Holy cow,” Maggie said. “Holy f-ing cow.”

“Screw the Avengers,” said Ryan, not whispering at all. “This is better than Agent Phil Coulson coming back from the dead.”

“What the hell? Where are they?” That was me.

“Rooftop,” Amber gasped. She was breathing hard like whatever she’d done had taken something out of her. “Let’s go before he does something even more stupid.”

I had no idea how she knew or if she meant Bo or Terry. Probably both.

HERE IS WHAT we saw when we rode the elevator to the roof and climbed up these little stairs and out the creaky metal door:

“Don’t!” Amber shouted. “Bo. No.”

Bo lifted Terry. His feet dangled in thin air.

My heart ceased beating. One second. Then two. Then I exhaled sharply and it coughed back to life. I realized that Ryan was holding my hand. His fingers intertwined with mine, gripping tightly. Maggie was wide-eyed and silent.

Amber’s gaze—dark, sad, painful—was trained on Terry McClain, the man she had loved. The man who had betrayed her and lost her and then betrayed her again by hurting us, by setting in motion something I didn’t even understand … didn’t want to understand.
Did Terry understand it? Probably not
. Bo was right. People did enough damage to the world all on their own. Evil didn’t need any bigger source.

“And now,” Bo said, his eyes also fixed on the man he was holding delicately in the air thirty stories up. “You are going to tell his what you did. You are not going to leave anything out. You must be held accountable, you know. That’s how this works.” His voice boomed so loud that I plucked my hand from Ryan’s and covered my ears.

“Put him down,” I said.

“Too late,” Bo thundered. He lifted Terry higher. Terry’s mouth opened and closed like a fish on a line.

“Put him down,” I said again.

“Miss Samuels,” said Bo Shivers, Texas slipping into his voice. “You’re gonna have to let me do my job. I hadn’t taken you for the squeamish type.”

“Do what she says,” Ryan told him. His hand was shaking but his voice was firm.

Maggie was crying. Maggie never cried. I couldn’t blame her. Maybe Amber could work some memory healing on her, just to make this whole thing less traumatic. But even as the thought flashed through my brain, I shoved it away. The truth hurts sometimes. It
should
hurt.

“Talk,” Bo told Terry, tightening his grip, his wrist scars twining darkly. “I’d suggest you spit it out pretty fast. My hand feels sort of twitchy. And these children here are quite impressionable. I’d hate to let them see you splatter.”

That, apparently, did the trick. Terry talked. He talked his head off while my heart beat itself into a frenzy, and Ryan gripped my hand and didn’t let go, and Maggie seized my other hand. Amber pressed her lips together. Her eyes—dry as a bone—never left Terry McClain.

It wasn’t a surprising story. I’d heard enough bits and pieces back at the lab. I’d heard other pieces when we were at Bo’s watching that terrible, mind-twisting PowerPoint. It was, in the end, the same crap that things like this always are: powerful people somewhere spending money to control whatever or whomever it was they wanted to control.

Terry McClain had been in on it since Austin. He had cheated on Amber. He thought he could trade up. He thought he was smart enough to control things. He had signed on to create memory drugs for a top secret group inside Texicon, connected to other people whose identity he honestly didn’t really know. He thought he could get away with it. He thought it didn’t matter. It was just chemistry, right? Just a job. He was paid very well. He moved up and came here to Texicon where he could use all their labs to create whatever he needed. He figured he was on his way. People would know him. They would remember his name. He would be important. Somebody.

But my brother and me—and Mags and Ryan—we’d stopped him. Because he’d been part of what had hurt my family even though none of us knew it at the time.

And Amber Velasco, well, I could read between the lines on that one. Management sending her here to shepherd Casey and by extension me … that was no coincidence. She was the only one who could have been sent because all of this was about her, too. Like me, she had been in the dark. Unlike me, she’d
wanted
to be there.

But like Casey, she made a damn good angel.

The confession of Terry McClain did not take long.

Of course, this was no Dr. Renfroe scenario. There would be no police involved. There was no one coming for Terry but us. And we were already here.

“So what do say, Ms. Velasco?” Bo asked her when Terry’s voice had dried up. “What shall we do with this man? Drop him? Set him on fire? Might burn down the whole place. Could be problematic.” He licked his lower lip. Cocked his head, looking for all the world like a curious bird, what with his wings still being fully extended.

A thin line of blood, dark and red, drizzled from Terry McClain’s nose. His glasses were gone. I’d seen them tumble and fall.

It felt like a long time before Amber answered. From up here, I could see everything: the mall and the trees and the water tower and bunches of houses, all looking pretty much the same. The wind had picked up, and I don’t think it was Bo’s doing, just the weather changing—finally. A blue norther was fixing to blow through. Fall was finally here in Houston. In a few days the time would change and it would be Halloween and then Thanksgiving and then people would be putting up Christmas trees again.

“I want him to forget,” Amber said. “I’d like all of them to. All of it, Bo. Every bit.”

At first I didn’t understand what she meant. Not the actual words of it, but the nature of the punishment. And then it drifted over me what she was saying. He would remain where he was but the rest of it would be wiped. He wouldn’t know what he’d been involved in. He wouldn’t know what he’d been working on or toward. He wouldn’t remember the blond man in the boots who’d threatened him back in the lab. It would
all be gone. He’d be head of the lab at Texicon. An ordinary person—not special in any way—working with his mice.

“If I take it all,” Bo said, “It’ll take you out, too. What you had with him, what you were to him. All of it. You understand that, Amber?” He used her first name this time, voice wrapping it gently.

She studied her feet like a great answer was written there. “Yes,” she said. “Yes I do. He deserves
that
, too.”

Bo nodded, one brief motion.

“And then we’ll wait.” Bo flicked his gaze over each of us. The world seemed to throb and thrum up here on the roof above the thirtieth floor—the tallest building in our little suburb. “We’ll see what happens. Who comes to see him. Who wants something from him. What else we can find out. Maybe nothing. Maybe something. Time will tell. And if there’s anything on this earth you and I seem to have, Ms. Velasco, it is time.”

In the end, they did it together, Bo and Amber. Closing their eyes and using their collective angel powers and wiping Terry’s memory clean. Bo set Terry down on the roof. Gently, which was a surprise.

Here was the thing about Bo Shivers, I understood then. For all his rage and badness, he was, like my brother, always at the core, an angel. He just couldn’t help it. Neither could Amber.

“Go,” Bo said to Terry. “Go back to your office and call nine-one-one about the storm and the wind shear.”

Terry went. We watched as he stepped back through the metal door and it closed behind him.

And then Bo’s gaze fell on me. Something unreadable crossed his grizzled face. He strode to me, pressing a hand to my cheek, the tips of his wings fluttering against me and
even though I was filled with something unreadable myself, I reached up and touched my fingertips to those scars he’d taken back to keep. “You okay, darlin’?” he asked, wings retracting and then gone like they had never been there.

I told him that I was.

S
ome other mild commotion ensued, both with the remaining lab guys and with more damage control and mentions of Management. The phrase “stupid and irresponsible” got tossed about more than once, including for the part where I had operated a motor vehicle while underage. And considerable colorful vocabulary once it really washed over Amber and Bo that I had told EVERYTHNG to Mags and Ryan.

This, Bo announced all high and mighty, was “unprecedented,” and I made him swear on his wings that he wouldn’t do what he had done to Terry and make them both forget. I tried to say it lightly, like I couldn’t imagine he’d really do it, but my insides clenched anyway. He made no promises. And eventually I told myself that he was telling the truth. At least for now. As for the future, well, that was the future.

Turns out that Amber had gotten my emergency pocket text, which was great to know. As for Bo, I figured Amber had called him or it had been that angel Spidey sense. But he said no.

“I knew you were a you-know-what,” Maggie said, flapping her arms like she was doing the Chicken Dance. “And I figured Jenna needed all the help she could get.” Here Mags turned to Ryan. “No offense, Ry. But you were in over your head, both of you. So I decided if I called the school and pretended there was some kind of emergency at Bo’s house near Texicon and asked if they knew his cell, then one of those school secretaries would at least call him even if they didn’t give me the number. Which is what happened. I knew if they told him ‘near Texicon’ he’d know something was up.”

Here Maggie fixed her gaze on Bo. “I mean you know you don’t have a house near Texicon, right?”

Bo, for perhaps the first time in millennia, was speechless. Maggie Boland was a force of nature.

There was more talk then. Ryan and I told everything we’d seen and heard, and I recounted the conversation between Terry and the guy in the boots. The two of them talking to each other had been real, not some crazy drug dream. This is what my own Jenna-sense—yes, this is what I was calling it—told me.

Memory drugs were out there. Terry McClain had helped develop them. Probably independently of Renfroe, which was strange, but as has been widely proven, strange things happen all the time. Something Big was at stake. It had started with my family, but it was bigger than that. Much bigger. And Bo’s belief that Oak View was at the bottom of it seemed to make sense now.

As for Terry McClain, it was his secrets that those men had come looking for that fateful night that Amber had been murdered. It was his fault that she was dead. He had betrayed her by cheating on her, had been gone the night she died alone
and then came back as an angel. And now he didn’t remember any of it, even the parts he had known. That had been Amber’s choice, and now I almost understood it.
She
would never forget. That fear and that pain and that sadness would be with her always. Like Bo … like me.

Except I was luckier than most. I had Mags. And for now, there was Ryan. Who, it turned out, had not run for the hills, not even one tiny, little step.