The Angel of Death Read Free Page B

those acts of co mmission, but rather an act of o mission. The truth lay in the painting Cameryn held.

    There they were, a pair of small, dark-haired girls in pink smocking, smiling the same shy smile, telling the same immutable truth she’d learned the night she’d read the letter from Hannah: Cameryn had once been a twin. Two halves of the same whole. Only the twin was gone, and Cameryn had been taken, borne away by her father to tiny, safe Silverton, where the San Juan Mountains would become the walls of her cloister.

    Staring at the picture, she studied her sister’s face. “How can I have no memory of you?” she whispered. “Little girl Jayne, lost and buried, gone forever. Why can’t I remember?”

    In her mirror she caught sight of her own reflection and suddenly understood the reason they were all becoming afraid for her. Her dark eyes, large in her face, had a hollowness that hadn’t been there before. Leaning in, she studied them, only inches away. They looked haunted. Would her mother even recognize her now? There was little resemblance between the child in the painting and the mirror’s reflection. Baby fat had melted away, and her face was longer, with high cheekbones and smooth lips. Yet her twin, frozen in time, would never age. “If you were here I wouldn’t be alone,” Cameryn murmured. And, for the millionth time, she wondered what might have been.

    “Hey, beautiful one, whatcha doing? Admiring yourself again?”

    Whirling around, Cameryn saw her best friend Lyric in the doorway.

    “Could you knock or something?” Cameryn cried. “You almost scared me to death!”

    “And why would a knock be less frightening? I say you would have jumped out of your skin either way.”

    Lyric had on a kinetic print of blues and reds, what she called a “3-D look”—the kind of pattern made with a paint wheel in school. Her pencil-leg jeans had been tucked into black boots with fringe along the top. Like shoots rising from a scorched landscape, Lyric’s blonde roots showed along the part in her blue hair. Lyric and Cameryn—they had been best, if unlikely, friends, since grade school.

    “Blame your mammaw—she told me to go right on up,” Lyric said. “I guess you were so busy staring at yourself that you didn’t hear me thumping up the steps. Of course, if I looked like you, I’d be checking me out, too.” Lifting a chubby hand to her forehead, Lyric said, theatrically, “Oh, how I hate mirrors!”

    “Shut up. You know you’re a goddess.”

    “A big goddess.”

    “Not that big.”

    “Thank you for that, thin one. If folks would just examine their history, they’d see that larger girls like moi used to be the standard for beauty. It wasn’t until the flapper era that skinny chicks like you pushed us out. You’ve ruined the curve, Cameryn. You and your legion of anorexic cousins.”

    It was true that Lyric took up space, but contrary to what she thought, it wasn’t so much her shape as her personality. A gifted student, an artist, a mystic, Lyric was in many ways Cameryn’s opposite, the fire to her ice, the yin to her yang. Outsiders would never have put the two of them together if they’d seen them on the street. With her blue hair and wild clothes, Lyric had a super-sized personality. She towered over Cameryn in height and in attitude. A crystal chanter, a New Ager, a spiritualist, Lyric often turned up her nose at Cameryn’s beloved science, fought against Cammie’s Catholicism, talked right over her when they were together, and made Cameryn laugh like no one else. The bond they’d formed on the playground had never been shaken. They were split-aparts—chosen sisters in the truest sense.

    Lyric jumped onto Cameryn’s bed and dropped the laundry basket on the floor with a resounding thud. Unlike Cameryn, Lyric wasn’t known for being fussy.

    “So! You weren’t at work today. I came by, and they said they sent you home early. Playing hooky, huh?” Lyric