Blood Redemption (Angel's Edge #3) (39 page)

Chloe lurked in the kitchen doorway, nose slightly upturned. Every year she could remember her mother baked on the first day of fall. Using tri-colored apples ripened to bursting on the hunchbacked little tree in their back yard, Miranda Burke made apple bread so dark and moist it was more cake than bread. Chloe smiled. The motion felt unfamiliar. Despite the aching, bewildering silence that had descended on them since her father’s death, she still loved to see her mother baking, her hands measuring and pouring and pinching as if she were casting spells.

Her mother Miranda had her own private way of deciding the seasons. Her method had nothing whatsoever to do with what the weatherman might say, or when the calendar proclaimed the first official day of fall. It was fall when Miranda Burke made the first loaves of apple bread, just as it was winter when she put the folded flannel sheets on the foot of the bed for Chloe to change. Chloe still loved her mother’s ways of marking the seasons, and even though it was only early September, weeks before the official start of fall, she was glad for the coming change.

“Apple bread for breakfast,” Miranda remarked with her back turned.

Chloe thought, for a single frozen second, about throwing herself against her mother’s back and crying like child. She looked, instead, for a coffee mug. “So I smell.” The sarcasm was heavier than she meant it to be.

Miranda only sighed. She turned and raised a cup of steaming coffee as if it was armor. “Happy Birthday, sweetheart,” she said carefully, as if she was alone in very small boat and Chloe was the changeable sea. Her mother treated her like a bomb about to go off at any minute, these days.

Chloe’s actual birthday had been days before, swallowed by the grief that hung over everything. Miranda seemed to think that dragging the event out in pieces over the course of days was some sort of solution. She gulped her breakfast so fast she almost choked. “Happy Saturday, Mom,” she shot back, wishing her mother would let this year’s un-birthday just die.

“Got big plans?” Miranda asked carefully. She leaned over the sink, but she wasn’t washing anything. Instead, she twisted the dishtowel so tightly Chloe was surprised she couldn’t hear it screaming.
So it’s going to be a fight again
.
She’s going to tell me no, and I’ll have to sneak out.

“Not really,” Chloe replied carefully. “Just some hanging out, with Holly, you know. Shopping and a movie, later.”
Plus I’m going out with that boy you can’t stand, and then a party you wouldn’t approve of
, she added mentally.

“Where will you be?” Miranda asked with the careful neutrality of a hostage negotiation.

“Around Little Five, I guess,” Chloe answered slowly, surprised. Her mother hadn’t protested. Yet. And she sounded…strange. Focused, instead of mad. “The Majestic, the movies, some shopping.”

Miranda’s knuckles were white around the dishrag. She had stopped all pretense of washing and stared, motionless, out the window directly over the sink. Their stunted, odd little apple tree stood directly in her line of vision. Chloe could see her Saturday night going down in flames as her mother stood, clearly wrestling with competing urges. ”I just don’t know how to protect you anymore,” her mother finally said, facing the window as if talking to the apple tree.

“
Mom
,” Chloe groaned. “I don’t need protecting. I’m going to the movies, not the dark side of the moon.”

Her mother slapped the dishrag into the sink. Suds floated down to the kitchen floor as she whirled on her daughter, her arms crossed. Chloe braced herself for the worst; her mother’s eyes were cold steel. “If I told you no you would just do it anyway. Trying to keep you here will just about guarantee your escape into the night.” Miranda spoke to her with the kind of vehemence she usually reserved for fights. ”You’re too much like your father. He knew what to do with you. I don’t. And even if I did… well, it wouldn’t matter now.” She stared at Chloe’s head as if she wanted to kiss it, but had forgotten how. Instead, she dug sharp wet fingertips into her shoulders. Her head rocked back as her mother gripped her, forcing her to meet dark brown eyes identical to her own. “Be safe. Be smart. Keep to the familiar.” Miranda’s voice softened and digging fingers turned into damp, detergent-scented hands cradling her face. “Keep to the light,” Miranda whispered, pulling her close.

Chloe nodded, open-mouthed and shocked. She clamped down hard on her obsolete counter-argument and fought, instead, against rising dread. But then her mother let her go abruptly, turning back to stare out the window again. Chloe felt the strangest urge to protect the woman with the long brown curls and rigidly perfect posture. Instead, she grabbed the movie section out of the paper and made her escape as quickly as she could.
Arson Suspected in Fatal Fires
, the front page said.

“I love you, sweetheart,” her mother called softly from the kitchen. “You’re all that’s left.” Chloe felt like a sneak and a thief for not answering back, but she couldn’t make herself. She didn’t want to be anyone’s everything. She didn’t have it in her anymore.

liot Gray stood across the parking lot from the movie theater, watching for her as the crowds ambled out into the night. He leaned against a wall, careful to have placed himself in the shadows. He had been following her since nightfall and had seen nothing to suggest she was in immediate danger.
For how much longer, though
? he wondered. Eliot hated the watching and the waiting, hugging the shadows when she was right there in front of him, laughing and carrying on with what passed for a normal teenage existence in this world. He stifled strange feelings of apprehension as he watched her leave the theater in the company of three others, one girl and two boys. Eliot tensed slightly as a tall blond boy pulled aggressively on her hand and whispered something into her hair.

None of my business
, he told himself fiercely. It was what her parents had wanted for her, to have as normal a life as possible. In this world in which they found themselves, that meant that teenage girls went on dates. Her aunt and parents had insisted this was the best way to protect her, to protect them all; removing her entirely from the Landing would erase the trail, and there would be no reason for
them
to try to find her. He hated the subterfuge, but he didn’t have much of a choice.
What am I going to do? March up to her and announce that I’m here to protect her from evil fiery creatures from another world? A world now burned to ash?
He snorted, imagining her reaction. He would be lucky if all she did was call the police or the mental ward. Besides, he’d make his presence known soon enough. It was past time, in his opinion, although his uncle hadn’t asked for it.
Cass is getting Miranda out tonight, and Chloe will come with us. Back to Gray’s Landing. She has to. Neither one of them is safe after her father’s murder.

His own appearance interrupted his dark thoughts as he used a storefront window to check the busy street behind him. Wild brown hair stuck up in stark relief next to pale skin. A large leather jacket covered black clothes that fit him snugly, leaving no extra fabric to catch or snag. He felt and looked as different from the people around him as midnight did from dawn. He walked further down the sidewalk, moving slowly, hunched over in his leather jacket, carefully hugging the shadows.

She moved in and out of brightly lit stores, laughing occasionally at something her companions said. As the evening wore on he grew tired of wandering the same small area, trying to look inconspicuous. He decided to move in closer. Not because he felt immediate danger, but because the homeless woman sitting on the bench against one of the few spindly trees in the area was starting to look at
him
funny, when it should definitely be the other way around. An old hippy beat incessantly on a set of bongos; he wanted to smack the man and tell him he had no rhythm, and probably wasn’t going to grow any at this late age, but he refrained. Instead, he watched as the group headed, laughing, into a brightly lit music store. It was large and crowded and throbbing with sound.
Perfect
, he thought. It would be easy to go unnoticed there. Besides, it had been months since he’d had a chance to lay his fingers on some high-quality vinyl. He wanted to feel like he belonged here, even if it only lasted for a nanosecond.

He scouted the record section, surrounded by the extremely nerdy and the ultra hip. He wondered where he fit, if at all, then shrugged. Refugees from decimated alien worlds didn’t get to fit in. It was part of why he loved music. It didn’t judge him, and it couldn’t reject or fear him either. Music had been one of his mother’s greatest gifts to him; his dim childhood memories of her were almost all framed with pounding, vibrant sound.

Music and how to kill was all he had left of her.

A voice he’d spent years trying in vain to forget jerked him back to the present. ”What’s wrong with the movie I picked?” asked Chloe Burke.
Her
voice. He would know it anywhere; he could feel it crawling across his brain, pinning her exact location to the insides of his closed eyelids. But he knew he was perceptually invisible to her. Her father had made sure of it, when he’d taken them all and left. Chloe’s slim fingers trailed across rows of plastic cases, her eyes distant, and voice listless.