Crescendo

CHAPTER 16

THREE HOURS LATER, THE FRONTS OF VEE’S THIGHS were toasted red, the tops of her feet were blistered, and her face was swollen with heat. Rixon had taken off an hour ago, and Vee and I were lugging the umbrella and beach tote up the alley branching off Old Orchard Street.

“I feel funny,” Vee said. “Like I’m going to pass out. Maybe I should have gone easy on the baby oil.”

I was lightheaded and uncomfortably warm too, but it didn’t have anything to do with the weather. A headache sliced down the center of my skull. I kept trying to swallow the bad taste in my mouth, but the more I swallowed, the queasier my stomach grew. The name “the Black Hand” skipped around my mind like it was taunting me to give it my full attention, stabbing its nails into my headache every time I tried to ignore it. I couldn’t think about it now, in front of Vee, having enough foresight to know I’d shatter the moment I did. I had to juggle the pain a little longer, tossing it up in the air every time it threatened to crash down. I clung to the safety of numb devastation, pushing the inevitable off as long as I could. Patch. The Black Hand. It couldn’t be.

Vee came to a halt. “What is that?”

We were standing in the parking lot at the rear of the bookstore, a few feet from the Neon, and we were staring at the large piece of metal attached to the left rear tire.

“I think it’s a car boot,” I said.

“I can see that. What’s it doing on my car?”

“I guess when they say violators will be towed, they mean it.”

“Don’t get smart with me. What are we going to do now?”

“Call Rixon?” I suggested.

“He’s not going to be very happy about having to drive all the way back out here. What about your mom? Is she back in town?”

“Not yet. How about your parents?”

Vee sat on the curb and buried her face in her hands. “It probably costs a fortune to get a car boot removed. This will be the last straw. My mom’s going to ship me off to a monastery.”

I took a seat beside her, and together we pondered our options.

“Don’t we have any other friends?” Vee asked. “Someone we could call for a ride without feeling too guilty? I wouldn’t feel guilty about making Marcie drive all the way out here, but I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t do it. Not for us. Especially not for us. You’re friends with Scott. Think he’d come get us? Hold on a minute … isn’t that Patch’s Jeep?”

I followed Vee’s gaze down the opposite end of the alley. It fed into Imperial Street, and sure enough, parked on the far side of Imperial was a shiny black Jeep Commander. The windows were tinted, a glare of sun reflecting off them.

My heart accelerated. I couldn’t run into Patch. Not here. Not yet. Not when the only thing keeping me from breaking down sobbing was a carefully constructed dam whose foundation cracked deeper with every passing second.

“He must be here somewhere,” Vee said. “Text him and tell him we’re stranded. I might not like him, but I’ll use him if it gets me a ride home.”

“I’d text Marcie before I’d text Patch.” I hoped Vee didn’t detect the strange, dull note of distress and loathing in my voice. The Black Hand … the Black Hand … not Patch … please, not Patch … a mistake, an explanation … The headache seared, as if my own body was warning me to stop this line of thinking for my own safety.

“Who else can we call?” Vee said.

We both knew who we could call. Absolutely no one. We were lame, friendless people. No one owed us a favor. The only person who would drop everything to come to my rescue was sitting beside me. And vice versa.

I directed my attention back to the Jeep. For no reason whatsoever, I stood. “I’m driving the Jeep home.” I wasn’t sure what kind of statement I intended to send to Patch. An eye for an eye? You hurt me, I’ll hurt you? Or maybe, This is only the start, if you had anything to do with my dad’s death …

“Is Patch going to be mad when he figures out you stole his Jeep?” Vee said.

“I don’t care. I’m not going to sit here all evening.”

“I have a bad feeling about this,” Vee said. “I don’t like Patch on a normal day, never mind when he’s got his temper on.”

“What happened to your sense of adventure?” A fierce desire had taken control of me, and I wanted nothing more than to take the Jeep and send Patch a message. I envisioned bumping the Jeep into a tree. Not hard enough to deploy the air bags, just hard enough to leave a dent. A little memento from me. A warning.

“My sense of adventure stops short of a kamikaze suicide mission,” said Vee. “It’s not going to be pretty when he figures out it was you.”

The logical voice in my head might have instructed me to back away for a moment, but all logic had left me. If he’d hurt my family, if he’d destroyed my family, if he’d lied to me—

“Do you even know how to boost a car?” Vee asked.

“Patch taught me.”

She didn’t look convinced. “You mean you saw Patch steal a car, and now you think you’ll give it a try?”

I strode down the alley toward Imperial Street, with Vee jogging close behind. I checked for traffic, then crossed to the Jeep. I tried the door latch. Locked.

“Nobody’s home,” Vee said, cupping her hands around her eyes to peer inside. “I think we should walk away. Come on, Nora. Back away from the Jeep.”

“We need a ride. We’re stranded.”

“We still have two legs, leftie and rightie. Mine are in the mood for exercise. They feel like a nice long walk—Are you crazy?” she shrieked.

I was standing with the tip of the beach umbrella aimed at the driver’s-side window. “What?” I said. “We have to get in.”

“Put the umbrella down! You’re going to draw a lot of negative attention if you smash out the window. What’s gotten into you?” she said, watching me, wild-eyed.

A vision flashed across my mind. I saw Patch standing over my dad, gun in hand. The sound of a shot ripped the silence.

I braced my hands on my knees and leaned over, feeling tears sting behind my eyes. The ground lurched into a nauseating spin. Sweat curved trails down the sides of my face. I was being smothered, as if all oxygen had suddenly evaporated from the air. The more I tried to draw air, the more paralyzed my lungs became. Vee was shouting at me, but it came from far away, an underwater sound.

All of a sudden the ground halted. I took three sharp breaths. Vee was ordering me to sit, yelling something about heat exhaustion. I pulled free from her grip.

“I’m okay,” I said, holding up a hand when she came for me again. “I’m okay.”

To show her I was fine, I bent to pick up my tote, which I must have dropped, and it was then that I saw the spare key to the Jeep gleaming gold in the bottom. The one I’d stolen from Marcie’s bedroom the night of her party.

“I have a key to the Jeep,” I said, the words surprising even me.

A frown mark stretched across Vee’s forehead. “Patch never asked for it back?”

“He never gave it to me. I found it in Marcie’s room Tuesday night.”

“Whoa.”

I shoved the key in the lock, climbed in, and sat in the driver’s seat. Then I adjusted the seat forward, cranked the ignition, and gripped the steering wheel with both hands. Despite the heat, my hands were cold and jittery.

“You’re not thinking about doing more damage than just driving this thing home, are you?” Vee asked, buckling herself into shotgun. “Because the vein in your temple is throbbing, and the last time I saw it do that was right before you clipped Marcie in the jaw at the Devil’s Handbag.”

I licked my lips, which felt sandpapery and rubbery at the same time. “He gave Marcie a spare to the Jeep—I should park this thing in the ocean, twenty feet under.”

“Maybe he had a really good reason,” Vee said nervously.

I gave a high slight laugh. “I won’t do anything to it until after I drop you off.” I cranked the wheel to the left and peeled onto the street.

“You swear to add that disclaimer when you try explaining to Patch why you stole his Jeep?”

“I’m not stealing it. We’re stranded. This is called borrowing.”

“This is called you’re crazy.” I could feel Vee’s bewilderment at my anger. I could see irrational in the way she stared at me. Maybe I was irrational. Maybe I’d pushed things over the edge. Two people can have the same nickname, I thought, trying to convince myself. They could. They could, they could, they could. I hoped the more I said it, the more I’d come to believe it, but the place that I reserved in my heart for trust felt hollow.

“Let’s get out of here,” Vee said, using a wary, frightened voice she never used with me. “We have lemonade at my place. After that we could watch TV. Maybe take a nap. Don’t you have to work tonight?”

I was about to tell her that Roberta hadn’t scheduled me tonight, when I tapped the brake. “What’s that?”

Vee followed my gaze. She bent forward, pulling a scrap of pink fabric off the dash. She dangled the French bikini top between us.

We looked at each other, and we were both thinking the same thing.

Marcie.

No doubt about it, she was here with Patch. Right now. On the beach. Lying on the sand. Doing who knows what else.

A violent, traitorous surge of hate spiked through me. I hated him. And I hated myself for adding my name to the list of girls he’d seduced, then betrayed. A raw desire to rectify my ignorance gripped me. I wasn’t going to be just another girl. He couldn’t make me disappear. If he was the Black Hand, I would find out. And if he’d had anything to do with my dad’s death, I would make him pay.

“He can find his own ride home,” I said through a quivering jaw. I punched the gas, laying down a stretch of rubber on the street.

Hours later, I stood in front of the fridge, door open, surveying the contents, looking for something that could pass as dinner. When nothing popped out at me, I moved to the narrow pantry kitty-corner to the fridge and did the same thing. I settled on a box of bow-tie pasta and a jar of sausage spaghetti sauce.

When the stove timer beeped, I drained the pasta, poured myself a bowl, and stuck the sauce in the microwave. We were out of Parmesan, so I grated cheddar and called it good. The microwave chimed, and I spooned layers of sauce and cheese on top of the pasta. As I turned to carry everything to the table, I found Patch leaning against it. The bowl of pasta nearly slipped through my fingers.

“How did you get in?” I asked.

“Might want to keep the door locked. Especially when you’re home alone.”

His stance was relaxed, but his eyes were not. The color of black marble, they cut right through me. I had no doubt he knew I’d stolen the Jeep. Hard not to, since it was parked in the driveway. There were only so many places to hide a Jeep at a house surrounded by open fields on one side, and impenetrable woodlands on the other. I hadn’t been thinking about hiding when I’d pulled the Jeep into the driveway; I’d been consumed by sickening abhorrence and shock. Everything had come into sharp focus: his smooth words, his black, glinting eyes, his broad experience with lies, seduction, women. I’d fallen in love with the devil.

“You took the Jeep,” Patch said. Calm but not happy.

“Vee parked in an illegal zone and they put a boot on her car. We had to get home, and that’s when we saw the Jeep across the street.” My palms touched with sweat, but I didn’t dare wipe them dry. Not in front of Patch. He looked different tonight. More severe, hardened. The wan glow of the kitchen lights traced the cut of his cheekbones, and his black hair, tousled from a day at the beach, hung low across his forehead, nearly touching his obscenely long eyelashes. His mouth, which I’d always thought of as sensual, was turned up cynically on one side. It wasn’t a warm smile.

“You couldn’t call and give me a heads-up?” he asked.

“I didn’t have my phone.”

“And Vee?”

“She doesn’t have your number on her phone. And I couldn’t remember your new number anyway. We didn’t have a way to reach you.”

“You don’t have a key to the Jeep. How’d you get in?”

It was all I could do not to give him a traitorous look. “Your spare.”

I saw him trying to calculate where I was going with this. We both knew he’d never given me a spare. I watched him closely for any sign that he knew I was referring to Marcie’s key, but the light of understanding never lit his eyes. Everything about him was controlled, impenetrable, unreadable.

“Which spare?” he asked.

This only made me angrier, because I’d expected him to know exactly which key I was talking about. How many spares did he have? How many other girls had a key to the Jeep stowed in their purses? “Your girlfriend,” I said. “Or is that not enough of a clarification?”

“Let me see if I’ve got this. You stole the Jeep to get back at me for giving a spare to Marcie?”

“I stole the Jeep because Vee and I needed it,” I said coolly. “There was a time when you were always there when I needed you. I thought maybe that was still true, but apparently I was wrong.”

Patch’s eyes didn’t waver from mine. “Want to tell me what this is really about?” When I didn’t answer, he dragged out one of the kitchen chairs tucked under the table. He sat, arms crossed, legs stretched out languidly. “I’ve got time.”

The Black Hand. That’s what this was really about. But I was scared to confront him. Because of what I might learn, and how he might react. I felt sure that he had absolutely no idea how much I knew. If I accused him of being the Black Hand, there was no turning back. I would have to face the truth that held the power to break me down to my very soul.

Patch raised his eyebrows. “Silent treatment?”

“This is about telling the truth,” I said. “Something you’ve never done.” If he’d killed my dad, how could he have looked me in the eye all those times, telling me how sorry he was, and never told me the truth? How could he kiss me, caress me, hold me in his arms, and live with himself?

“Something I’ve never done? From the day we met, I never lied to you. You didn’t always like what I had to say, but I was always up-front.”

“You let me believe you loved me. A lie!”

“I’m sorry it felt like a lie.” He wasn’t sorry. There was a look of stony fury in his gaze. He hated that I was calling him out. He wanted me to be like all the other girls and disappear into his past without so much as a peep.

“If you felt anything for me, you wouldn’t have moved on to Marcie in record time.”

“And you didn’t move on to Scott in record time? You’d rather have half a man than me?”

“Half a man? Scott is a person.”

“He’s Nephilim.” He made a careless gesture in the direction of the front door. “The Jeep has more value.”

“Maybe he feels the same way about angels.”

He shrugged, lazy and arrogant. “I doubt it. If it weren’t for us, his race wouldn’t exist.”

“Frankenstein’s monster didn’t love him.”

“And?”

“The Nephilim race is already seeking revenge on angels. Maybe this is only the beginning.”

Patch raised his ball cap and dragged a hand through his hair. From the look on his face, I got the impression that the situation was far more dangerous than I’d originally been led to believe. How close was the Nephilim race to overpowering fallen angels? Surely not by this Cheshvan. Patch couldn’t mean that in less than five months, swarms of fallen angels would invade, and eventually kill, tens of thousands of humans. But everything in the way he held himself, down to the very look in his eye, told me that was exactly what was in store.

“What are you doing about it?” I asked, horrified.

He picked up the glass of water I’d poured for myself and left on the table, and took a drink. “I’ve been told to stay out of it.”

“By the archangels?”

“The Nephilim race is evil. They were never supposed to inhabit Earth. They exist because of the pride of fallen angels. The archangels want nothing to do with them. They’re not going to step in where Nephilim are concerned.”

“And all the humans who will die?”

“The archangels have their own plan. Sometimes bad things have to happen before good things can.”

“Plan? What plan? To watch innocent people die?”

“The Nephilim are walking straight into a trap of their own making. If people have to die to annihilate the Nephilim race, the archangels will risk it.”

The hairs on my scalp prickled. “And you agree with them?”

“I’m a guardian angel now. My allegiance is to the archangels.” A blaze of killing hate rose in his eyes, and for one brief moment, I believed it was directed at me. As if he blamed me for what he’d become. In my defense, I felt a wash of anger. Had he forgotten everything from that night? I’d sacrificed my life for him, and he rejected it. If he wanted to blame someone for his circumstances, it wasn’t me!

“How strong are the Nephilim?” I asked.

“Strong enough.” His voice was disturbingly devoid of concern.

“They could hold off the fallen angels as early as this Cheshvan, couldn’t they?”

He gave a nod.

I hugged myself to ward off a deep, sudden chill, but it was more psychological than physical. “You have to do something.”

He shut his eyes.

“If fallen angels can’t possess Nephilim, they’ll move on to humans,” I said, trying to break through his hands-off attitude and reach his conscience. “That’s what you said. Tens of thousands of humans. Maybe Vee. My mom. Maybe me.”

He still said nothing.

“Don’t you even care?”

His eyes flicked to his watch, and he pushed up from the table. “I hate to rush out of here when we’ve got unfinished business, but I’m late.” The spare key to the Jeep was lying in a dish on the sideboard, and he pocketed it. “Thanks for the key. I’ll add borrowing the Jeep to your tab.”

I parked myself between him and the door. “My tab?”

“I got you home from the Z, got you off Marcie’s roof, and now I let you use my Jeep. I don’t give out favors for free.”

I was pretty sure he wasn’t joking. In fact, I was pretty sure he was dead serious.

“We can work it so you pay me after each individual favor, but I figured a tab would be easier.” His smile was a taunting curve. First-class-jerk smug.

I narrowed my eyes. “You’re actually enjoying this, aren’t you?”

“One of these days I’m going to come to collect on the favors, and then I’ll really be enjoying it.”

“You didn’t loan me the Jeep,” I argued. “I stole it. And it wasn’t a favor—I commandeered it.”

He gave his watch a second glance. “We’re going to have to finish this later. I’ve got to run.”

“That’s right,” I snapped. “A movie with Marcie. Go have fun while my world hangs in the balance.” I told myself I wanted him to go. He deserved Marcie. I didn’t care. I was tempted to hurl something after him; I thought about slamming the door at his back. But I wasn’t going to let him go without asking the question that burned my every thought. I dug my teeth into the inside of my cheek to keep my voice from unraveling. “Do you know who killed my dad?” My voice was cold and controlled, and not my own. It was the voice of someone who was filled to the very tips of her fingers with hate, devastation, accusation.

Patch stopped with his back to me.

“What happened that night?” I didn’t bother trying to hide the desperation in my voice.

After a moment of silence, he said, “You’re asking me like you think I might know.”

“I know you’re the Black Hand.” I shut my eyes briefly, feeling my whole body sway under a wave of nausea.

He looked over his shoulder. “Who told you that?”

“Then it’s true?” I realized my hands were balled into fists at my sides, shaking violently. “You’re the Black Hand.” I watched his face, praying he’d somehow refute it.

The grandfather clock in the hall chimed the hour, a heavy, reverberating sound.

“Get out,” I said. I wouldn’t cry in front of him. I refused to. I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.

He stood in place, his face cold with shadow, mildly satanic.

The clock counted through the silence. One, two, three.

“I’ll make you pay for it,” I said, my voice still oddly foreign.

Four, five.

“I’ll find a way. You deserve to go to hell. The only thing that could make me sorry is if the archangels beat me to it.”

A flash of hot black crossed his eyes.

“You deserve everything that’s coming to you,” I told him. “Every time you kissed me and held me, knowing what you did to my dad—” I choked and turned away, falling apart when I could least afford it.

Six.

“Go away,” I said, my voice quiet, but not steady.

I looked up, glaring, intending to make Patch leave with the intensity of hate and loathing in my eyes, but I was alone in the hall. I glanced around, expecting him to have stepped out of my view, but he wasn’t there. A strange silence settled in between the shadows, and I realized the grandfather clock had stopped beating.

Its hands were frozen on the six and twelve, having stopped the moment Patch left for good.