Landing Read Free Page A

time. We rotate, and tonight Tarren takes watch. He
stretches out on his stomach on the Murano’s roof, scanning the fields around
us through a pair of binoculars and listening to the police scanner for any
trouble.
    Gabe and I dig. There’s an art to
it as Gabe has shown me. Dig around the sides first, otherwise the hole will
get smaller and smaller as you dig down. The exertion warms my muscles, and,
across from me, Gabe takes a moment to shed his blood-stained hoodie. I can
smell the sweat coming off him.
    “Hey, you want to, like, go cow
tipping when we’re done with this?” he whispers to me.
    “What the hell is that?” I raise an
eyebrow at him.
    “You know, it’s like…you push cows
over,” Gabe says. Despite the fact that he’s actually twenty-three, Gabe’s
maturity level has a habit of dipping into prepubescent territory on occasion.
I’ve come to believe that this is in direct response to Tarren, who is
twenty-six going on forty.
    “And then what?” I ask.
    Gabe laughs like this is the
dumbest question in the world. “Then they fall over. God, how do you not know
this?”
    “We don’t have cows in Connecticut.
Least not in Hartford,” I say with a shrug. I throw another shovelful of dirt
onto the growing pile. “Anyway, cow tipping sounds lame.”
    “Your face is lame,” Gabe says
back. He smiles at me, and I give him a half-hearted replica in return. I know
why Gabe does it—the jokes, this total nonsense even as we dig an impromptu
grave. Things would be unbearable if he didn’t, but still. The corpse isn’t
even buried yet, and things got so close to being utterly fucked, and I’m still
lulling in waves of nausea each time I think back to that ice cream rooftop.
    The grave opens up before us. My strength
makes me a canny digger—another impressive new skill to add to the growing
list, which includes acrobatic tree jumper, soup can executioner, pushup master
(two hundred in a row the last time Tarren tested me), and rat exterminator. I
suppose that list could also include “quickly improving reader of auras”. Not
that my brothers are aware of this last skill. They know I can see energy—and
perhaps Tarren suspects something more—but I haven’t told them about the
colors; the feelings and emotions I read in their auras like an open broadcast.
    When Gabe approves the grave’s
width and depth, we drop in the body and top it with the additional sheets of
bloody tarp from the trunk. The Fox brothers have not come up with any words to
say over their conquered foes. Ryan always accused me of being overly dramatic,
but I need to say something. Or at least think something.
    Gabe knows to wait and, thankfully,
to be quiet. I kneel down next to the hole.
    You embraced the change and
chose to feed off the lives of innocents. Your death was merited, and I
do not regret it. But I know how loudly the hunger calls. I know we all have
some measure of darkness in our hearts. May you be at peace.
    It’s not much, and I don’t believe
in heaven or hell or anything that simple, but it just seems right that these
creatures should get some sort of sendoff, even if it must be given by the ones
who sheared their thread of life. I’m sure it doesn’t do a wit of good except
to cull my own rutted conscience. But still.
    We pile on the dirt. The angel is
gone. We—Fox brothers and hybrid angel half-sister girl—are weary. The night
has grown pale along the horizon. We throw the shovels into the back of the SUV
and find our seats. Gabe takes the wheel.
    “Seatbelts,” he calls out, because
this is just something he always does. I sneak a rat out of the trunk, and the
boys pretend not to notice when I hunch over to drain it and then toss the cold
corpse out the window. Tarren plugs into the police scanner, and I have some of
Diana’s books in the back that I’ve already read on the way here. Gabe never
brings up the frat party.
    We get back on the highway and head
for home.

 
     
    Chapter 3
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