The Second Sign Read Free Page A

reminder that their connection as
     twins was seeping down the toilet.
    “We're going to the lake house.”
    The coiling around the chest thing came back and she
     forced herself to breathe. “No. I can't go there.”
    “I'm not asking you.” His voice turned cold, deep,
     and throaty.
    “You're not my keeper.” Gabby lifted her hands in
     front of her, trying to shade her eyes from the blinding light
     bouncing off his wings.
    “I'm older than you.” He took a step forward.
    “Yeah, by six minutes.”
    “I was sent by—” He stopped and furled his wings
     where they hid behind him. Gabby lowered her hands. His lips drew
     into a thin line, and the muscles on his face were at work mauling
     the inside of his cheek. Something he did when he mentioned their
     father. He rubbed his palms together. “Him.”
    “So what?” It hurt like hell and he knew it. Gabby
     didn't even know her father's name, only that he was an angel. She
     wouldn't have believed it if she didn't have a brother who sprouted
     wings.
    “We always go to the lake house for the summer.”
    They went to the lake house to celebrate their
     birthdays since no one exactly knew what disaster awaited them, or
     what transformation would accompany their date of birth. For the
     past two birthdays, Gabby had almost met certain death. Almost
     mauled by a Rottweiler on her fourteenth birthday, and on her
     fifteenth birthday, Kyle Turner died after saving her from a fire
     that swept through the Mason Fertilizer Plant near their lake
     house.
    “Please Maximus, don’t do this. I don’t want to go
     back there.”
    “We just don't know what’s going to happen.”
    “But you're an angel, isn't your boss, like,
     all-knowing?”
    “It doesn't work that way.”
    “Right. Free will. So I deserve this.” She dropped
     back on the bed and covered her face with her pillow.
    “Gabriela.”
    She hated when he said her whole name. “Fine. I'll
     go hide out at the lake house. Be homeschooled until you figure out
     what to do with me. Can you get out of my room now?”

Chapter Three
    Going Nowhere Fast
     
    Jake Myers believed he would live forever. Extreme
     sports grounded him. The more he lived on the edge of life, the
     more he appreciated his existence. So when his dad sent him and his
     sister, Jenna, packing to some lame ass water lagoon retreat, he
     was astronomically pissed.
    “It’s for your own good. You need to settle down.
     You need to start concentrating on what college you’re going to, on
     careers and jobs, and become more...domesticated.”
    Yup, that’s the word Dad used. Domesticated. As if
     Jake was some sort of housebroken puppy.
    “Who uses words like domesticated?” he asked Jenna
     while she drove toward Nowhere USA fast. It was actually Mount
     Desert Island, Maine. The only town in Maine Jake ever heard of was
     Castle Rock, and that didn’t even exist.
    Jenna sighed. The oldest of this sibling group, he
     gave her credit for maneuvering through high tide with Dad and
     agreeing to babysit.
    “He’s just worried that you’re not serious about
     your life.”
    A snort, Porky Pig style, escaped his lips. “Yeah,
     well I’m not dead yet.”
    “Come on, Jake. Just give it a try. I don’t think I
     can handle a pissed off seventeen-year-old male in my vicinity.
     Check out the scene, meet different people, and”—she shrugged and
     gave him a sideways glance—“you never know, you know.”
    He turned away from her, a scowl cinching his
     features. “I hate it when you say that.”
    He lifted his feet up on the dash, deciding it best
     to breathe and try out the yoga meditation Jenna had been listening
     to through half the ride. And it had been a very long ride. He
     would give it three weeks and then he’d defect. Domesticated or
     not, he wasn’t living his last full summer before senior year in a
     hell-hole restricted, preppy ass... breathe . He closed his
     eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.
    He