“Yeah, well. This isn’t exactly a place I expected to be when I woke up this morning, you know?”
“I know. I can’t believe Christian knew all about this, and he never told us,” she says, still peeved.
“Oh, lay off Christian. It’s not like you’re such an open book yourself,” I snap, using Christian’s words. “Hypocritical much?”
Angela sucks in a breath. Her jaw tightens. Then she tosses her long pigtails over her shoulders, snaps her journal closed, and lies down, putting her back to me. Off goes the flashlight.
We lie there in the dark, stars overhead, the whispering of trees. It’s way too quiet. Angela doesn’t say anything, but I can tell that she’s not asleep. Her breaths are shaky, and I know she’s mad.
“Ange. .,” I say when the silence grows unbearable. “You’re right, I’m sorry. I get so sick of it, too, all the secrets. Sometimes I feel like nobody in my life is completely straight with me, ever. It really ticks me off.”
“No, you’re right,” she says after a minute, her voice muffled by the sleeping bag.
“Christian never promised he’d tell us anything. This place is classified, I get that.”
“Did you just say I’m right?” I say as solemnly as I can manage.
“Yeah. So?”
“Nothing. I just wanted to write it down or something. In case I never hear you say that again.”
She turns slightly and shoots a grin over her shoulder. “Yeah, you should do that, since you’re unlikely to be right ever again.”
Fight officially over. Which is a relief, because Angela can be a royal pain in the behind when she’s angry.
“The secrecy is part of being an angel-blood,” she says right as I’m starting to fall asleep.
“You know that, right?”
“What?” I say groggily.
“We always have to hide ourselves. From the Black Wings, from the rest of the world.
Take your mom, for instance. She’s over a hundred, but she looks like she’s forty, which means all her life she’s had to keep moving so that people wouldn’t notice that she didn’t age naturally.
She always has to have a secret identity. After that long, the secrecy would become second nature, don’t you think?”
“But I’m her daughter. She can trust me. She should tell me about these things.”
“Maybe she can’t.”
I think about this for a minute, remember the fear I sensed from her earlier at the campfire.
Fear of what? I wonder. What’s so scary about us talking about hell? Besides the obvious, that is.
And why hasn’t she told the congregation about what happened with Samjeeza?
“Do you really think she’s the leader of the congregation?” I ask.
“I think it’s highly possible,” Angela says.
Then I realize something else: my mom knows Walter Prescott, Christian’s uncle. Which means that she probably knew from the day I came home and said his name that Christian was more than just a boy I had to rescue from a forest fire. All that time, she knew that Christian was an angel-blood. She knew that my purpose was more than a simple search and rescue.
She knew.
“Why didn’t she tell me?” I whisper. Suddenly I don’t feel so bad that I never told her about Angel Club.
“Just catching up now, are we?” Angela whispers back.
“I guess.”
“She could have a good reason,” Angela says.
“She’d better have a good reason,” I say.
It’s a long time before I fall asleep.
I dream of roses, white roses, the edges already starting to brown. I’m standing in front of a mound of freshly turned earth, staring down at Mom’s nice black pumps on my feet, and I’m holding roses. Their sweet scent fills my nose. I can sense the presence of other people around me, but I don’t look up from the dirt. This time, I don’t feel grief so much as I feel hollow inside.
Numb. The wind stirs my hair, blows it across my face, but I don’t brush it back. I stand there, holding the roses, staring at the grave.
Death is a transition, I try to tell myself, a passing from one plane of existence to another.
It’s not the end of the world.
That’s what Mom has always told me. But I guess that depends on how you define the end of the world.
The roses are wilty. They need water, and suddenly I can’t stand the thought of leaving them to dry up and die. So I crush them between my hands. I tear off their heads and then I let the petals sift through my fingers, falling oh so slowly, gently, onto the dark soil.
Christian is standing by the lake in the moonlight. I watch him bend to pick up a rock, turning the smooth stone in his hand a few times before he leans and skips it across the water.
Every time I see him I’m struck by the fact that I don’t actually know him. In spite of all the conversations we’ve had, the time we’ve spent in Angel Club together, the way I memorized practically every detail about him last year like some obsessed little Mary Sue, he’s still a mystery to me. He’s still that stranger who I only get glimpses of.
He turns and looks at me.
“Hi,” I say awkwardly, suddenly aware that I’m in my jammies and my hair must look like a bird’s nest.
