Hallowed

Chapter 8 Summer Without Crickets

I’m crammed shoulder to shoulder between Mom and Angela in the circle by the fire, looking around at the faces lit by its glow. Billy is spinning this tale about one time back in the thirties when she and my mom literally bumped into a Black Wing at the Santa Anita racetrack.

“It was Asael,” Billy says. “In a three-piece dove-gray linen suit, if you can believe that.”

“What did you do?” someone asks in a hushed voice, like this big baddie might be able to hear us.

“We couldn’t exactly fly away, now could we?” Billy says with a wry smile. “There were so many people around. But then he couldn’t confront us, either, not the way he would have wanted to. So we went back to our seats with our lemonade, and he went back to his, and after the race he was gone.”

“We were lucky,” Mom says.

“Yes, we were,” agrees Billy. “Although I’ll never for the life of me figure out what he was doing there.”

“Betting on Seabiscuit, like everybody else,” Mom says.

A few people laugh.

Billy sighs. “What a race that was. You can’t find sport like that anymore. Things aren’t the same now.”

“You sound like little old ladies,” says Jeffrey good-naturedly, though not about to let anybody knock his beloved sports. Then he does his old lady impression: “Back before the war. .”

Billy laughs and reaches to ruffle his hair. He blushes. “We are old ladies, kid. Don’t let our appearance fool you.” She slings an arm around my mom and squeezes. “We’re crones.”

“If you could have flown — I mean, if there hadn’t been so many other people around to see you — would it have made any difference?” pipes up Angela. “Can Black Wings fly?” Everybody gets quiet, sobering fast, the only noise the crackling of the fire.

“What?” asks Angela, looking around. “It was only a question.”

“No,” answers my mom finally. “Black Wings don’t fly.”

“Unless they turn into birds,” corrects Billy. “I’ve seen them do that.”

“Black Wings don’t have anywhere to go but down,” says a man with red hair and a short, neatly trimmed beard. Stephen, I think I heard my mom call him. He has a deep voice, like one of those movie-trailer voices. The voice of doom.

I officially have goose bumps.

“But not literally down, right?” says Angela. “Because hell is a dimension underneath our own, so it’s not some sort of bottomless fiery pit.”

“Right,” Mom says, which blows my mind. Why is she suddenly so free with information?

I remind myself that this is a good thing, although my brain is already starting to overload with so much new stuff to take in.

“Plus hell is typically chilly. Nothing fiery about it. Lots of cold days in hell,” says Billy.

“And how would you know that, Bill?” someone from across the fire teases.

“Mind your own business,” Billy retorts with a grin.

“In all seriousness, though,” says Stephen, since he’s a serious kind of guy. “None of us has ever been to hell, so it’s pure speculation about the temperature.” I dare a glance at Mom, who doesn’t meet my eyes. So she hasn’t told them about our fantastic trip to the underworld with Samjeeza, and if she hasn’t told them, I’m certainly not going to.

“Why?” Angela never did know when to shut up. “Why haven’t you been to hell?” You’d think the answer to that would be, Because we’re not evil, thank you very much, but instead Stephen says, “Because we can’t pass between dimensions on our own. We need the Intangere to help us, and no angel-blood who’s been taken to hell by a Black Wing has ever returned to tell us what it’s like there.”

Again I look at Mom. Again she looks away.

The campfire gives a sudden loud pop, which makes us all jump.

“Steve, you’re scaring the children,” Mom scolds.

“We’re not children,” Jeffrey says. “We want to know.”

Billy nods. “Understandable,” she says, casting a significant glance at Mom. “That’s why you’re here. To get answers.”

I get a glimmer of what Mom’s feeling. Resignation. But she’s accepted that this is going to happen, even if it’s so very dangerous for us. It makes her heart beat fast, but she sits there and tries to keep her breathing even.

I guess we really are going to get some answers.

“So you fight the Black Wings?” I ask. “Is that the point of the congregation?”

“No.” Billy shakes her head. “We don’t fight them, not physically speaking, at least not if we can help it. We’d lose, nine times out of ten, maybe ten times out of ten. Our best defense against Black Wings is to stay undetected. Which we’ve largely managed to do. Most of the people here have never even seen a Black Wing, let alone fought one.”

“So what do you do, then?” Jeffrey asks, a tad belligerently, like he’s disappointed not to be battling the fallen angels one-on-one. “If you don’t fight them?”

“We track down angel-bloods,” answers Mr. Phibbs. “Get to them before the other side does. Tell them about who and what they are. Help them.”

“And we follow our purpose,” Mom adds, finally looking at me. “That’s how we do our part. We figure out what we’re supposed to do and we do it.” Interesting.

I’m still not going to accept my purpose if it means that Tucker has to die.

Walter Prescott suddenly stands up on the other side of the fire. “Enough talk,” he says. “I think it’s time for s’mores. Who wants s’mores?”

I look across at Christian. He’s holding a bag of marshmallows in one hand and a bag of chocolate bars in the other like some sort of peace offering. He smiles.

“I do,” Jeffrey says.

Once again, ladies and gentlemen, my brother and his stomach.

Everyone settles into eating. Angela looks downtrodden that the Black Wing conversation is done, but in a few minutes she’s over it, leaning forward again, listening to more stories with a glow in her golden eyes, big smile on her face. She’s on cloud nine, basking in this sense of community she’s never had before. Even Jeffrey likes it here. Earlier he played a game of soccer with some of the other angel-bloods, a real game where he didn’t have to hold anything back.

He’s got this air about him of deep satisfaction, like that’s all he ever wanted, just to play some serious sports and eat some good food and not have to be anything but what he is.

I should feel like that too, I guess, enjoying this thing. So why don’t I?

Let’s see, chimes the voice in my head, well, you failed at your purpose. How many of the people here did that? And it looks like your boyfriend is destined to die. And your mom clearly doesn’ t trust you as far as she can throw you. And you don’ t know these people, but they’ re all looking at you like they know you.

“So, Mr. Prescott,” says Mr. Phibbs when we’re all tapped out on s’mores, sticky with marshmallow and smeared with chocolate. I wonder if angel-bloods can have sugar comas.

“Me?” asks Christian. He has chocolate on his chin.

“Yes, you,” says Mr. Phibbs. “You’re our newest member, I hear.”

“Yes, sir,” says Christian, his face getting red.

You’re a member? I think at him incredulously.

He blinks in surprise that I am talking to him via brain. That it could be that easy, between us, when it’s so hard with everyone else. Yes. As of this morning.

And how does one become a member, exactly?

You make a promise to serve the light. To fight for the side of good.

I thought they said they didn’t fight.

He gives me the mental equivalent of a shrug.

And that’s what you did this morning?

Yes, he says unwaveringly. I took an oath.

And so the revelations keep on coming.

“How is any of this possible?” I ask Angela later, when we’re both in our pj’s, snuggled up in our sleeping bags. We zipped the top off the tent so we can look up and see the spattering of stars over our heads. The air is cooler than it was earlier, but still completely comfortable. We don’t even need tents, at least not for the weather, although they do afford us some sense of privacy out here in the open meadow, where separate fires are spread all around us. Every now and then I catch the scent of snow on the wind, and it reminds me that we’re in this magic oasis in the middle of the forest, that everywhere else it’s winter, but here it’s summer.

“Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” I say to Angela.

“I know, right?” Angela says with a laugh. “It’s Billy.”

“What do you mean?” I turn over onto my side to look at her.

“Billy can do things with the weather. I guess it’s an extremely rare gift for an angel-blood. I’d never even heard of it before. Billy comes out here about a week before the meeting and makes it all grow.”

“So Billy told you all this?”

“She told me some,” Angela says. “Not as much as I wanted her to. She was nice to me and all, but she really just wanted to gab with your mom. They seem like best friends.”

“They do,” I agree. “It’s so weird.”

My mom has a best friend, someone I don’t remember, someone I didn’t even know about until today. I think about the way they sat together at the fire, with the same blanket wrapped around them, and how Billy would sometimes lean to whisper something in Mom’s ear that made her smile.

How could she not tell me about her best friend?

“This is so awesome,” Angela says. She turns to me with bright eyes. “Want to hear more about what I did learn?”

I can’t help but giggle at the excited puppy-dog expression on her face. “You’re like a kid in a candy store here, aren’t you?”

“Oh come on, can you blame me? This is an amazing research opportunity.” Leave it to Angela to see this as a “research opportunity.”

“Okay, let’s hear it,” I say.

She fishes her notebook out of her bag and turns on a flashlight, flips through the pages to find her place.

“Okay,” she says, clearing her throat, “here’s the skinny: the northwest branch of the congregation has been meeting here since just after Wyoming officially became a state back in 1890. Right now there are about forty members.”

“So it’s not all Jackson people?”

She shakes her head. “They’re from all over the northwestern United States. But I did find out that Jackson is a kind of angel-blood hot spot, with the highest concentration of us living here than anywhere else in the area. I couldn’t get anybody to tell me why though. I have a theory that it’s the mountains, but that’s just a theory.”

“Okay, Miss Wikipedia,” I tease.

She grins, swats at me feebly, and then returns to the notebook. “Most of the angel-bloods here are Quartarius. There are only nine Dimidius, and they’re the leaders of the group.”

“Right. Because the Dimidius are so rare and special,” I say with a hefty dose of sarcasm.

Angela scoffs, but there’s an excited glitter in her eyes. Here, where most of the people are a mere quarter angel, Angela is a half. She is rare, and special, and all that.

“I’ve also noticed that everybody treats your mom differently than the others,” she adds.

“Like at the campfire, everyone always listened carefully to what she said, like she’s a font of wisdom or something, even though she didn’t talk very often.” It’s true. When Mom got up and said she was going to go to bed, everybody moved carefully out of her way as she passed. There was something about the way they responded to her, a particular kind of reverence.

“Maybe she’s their leader,” Angela says. “I think it’s a democracy here, but maybe she’s like the president.”

Man. How could she not tell me any of this?

“Are you okay?” Angela asks. “You look like you’re freaking out again.”

“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. “Sorry. I didn’t know anybody would be out here.”

“Can’t sleep?” he asks.

The smell of roses lingers in my nose. My hands still feel pricked by the thorns, but when I inspect them, they’re fine. It’s all in my head. I am driving myself loony tunes.

“Angela snores,” I say, instead of trying to explain myself. I bend down to look for my own skipping rock, find one — a small flat stone the color of charcoal. I stare out at the lake, where the moon is rippling. “So how do you do this?” I ask.

“The trick is in the wrist,” he says. “Kind of like Frisbee.” I toss the rock and it goes straight into the water without even a splash.

“I meant to do that,” I say.

He nods. “Sure. Perfect form, by the way.”

“There’s something off about this weather,” I say.

“You think?”

“No, I mean, something missing. It feels like summer except—” I think back to all my late nights with Tucker last summer, gazing up at the stars from the back of his pickup, naming the constellations and making up the ones we didn’t know. The thought of Tucker makes my throat get tight. I remind myself that my dream doesn’t happen until spring. I don’t even know if it’s this spring. I have time. I’ll figure this out. Stop it, somehow.

“Crickets,” I say as it occurs to me. “In the summer, there are always crickets chirping.

But here it’s quiet.”

We listen to the sound of the water lapping at the shore.

“Tell me about your vision, Clara. The new one, I mean,” Christian says then. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to know, officially. Because you’re thinking about it pretty much nonstop, and I’m not doing a very good job at not noticing.”

My breath catches. “I already told you most of it. It’s Aspen Hill. Springtime. I’m walking up the hill with all these people, apparently headed for a grave. And you’re there.”

“What do I do?”

“You. . uh. . you try to comfort me. In my head you say, ‘You can do this.’ You hold my hand.” I start searching around for another rock so I won’t have to meet his eyes.

“You think it’s Tucker who’s going to die,” he says.

I nod, still not daring to look over at him. “I can’t let that happen.” He coughs, then does his laugh/exhale thing. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you’ve decided to fight your vision.”

This should be the part where I feel sorrow, if Mom is right. I’m definitely fighting my purpose, pushing back against all that I think is expected of me. But all I feel in this moment is anger. Even though I suppose it’s true; I can never accept things. I can never let them be what they are. I’m always trying to change them.

“Hey, you asked me, and I told you. You don’t like it, tough beans.” I start to storm off back toward my tent. He catches my hand.

I really wish he would stop touching me.

“Don’t get mad, Clara. I want to help,” he says.

“How about you mind your own business?”

He laughs, lets go of my hand. “Okay, too late to tell you not to get mad. But I mean it.

Tell me why you think it’s Tucker’s funeral.”

I stare at him. “You don’t believe me? That’s not exactly helpful.”

“I didn’t say that. It’s just—” He’s tongue-tied in a way I’ve never seen. “Well, I thought my vision was showing me one thing, and then it turned out totally different.”

“Right, because I blew it for you,” I say.

“You didn’t blow it.” He catches my eye. “I think you changed it. But what I’m saying is that I didn’t really understand it before. I couldn’t.”

“And you understand it now?”

His gaze breaks away. “I didn’t say that.” He picks up a rock and skips it perfectly across the water. “I want to make sure you know that I don’t think you ruined anything, Clara. It’s not your fault.”

“How do you figure that?”

“You followed your heart. That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“You actually mean it.” I’m stunned. I’d always assumed he’d blame me.

“Yes,” he says with a ghost of a smile. “I actually do.”