Hush, Hush

Chapter 26

It was the Sunday night before the start of spring break, and the movie theater was packed. I got in the ticket line, continually looking around for signs that I'd been followed. Nothing alarming so far, and the press of bodies offered good cover. I told myself Patch would take care of Dabria and that I had nothing to worry about, but it didn't hurt to be vigilant.

Of course, deep inside, I knew Dabria wasn't my biggest worry. Sooner or later Patch was going to figure out I wasn't at Delphic. Based on past experience, I didn't have any illusions about being able to hide long-term from him. He would find me. And then I'd be forced to confront him with the question I was dreading. More specifically, I dreaded his answer. Because there was a shadow of doubt at the back of my mind, whispering that Dabria had been telling the truth about what it would take for Patch to get a human body.

I stepped up to the ticket window. The nine-thirty movies were just starting.

"One for The Sacrifice" I said without thinking. Immediately I found the title eerily ironic. Not wanting to reflect further on it, I fished in my pockets and pushed a wad of small bills and coins under the window, praying it was enough.

«Jeez» the teller said, staring at the coins spilling under the window. I recognized her from school. She was a senior, and I was pretty sure her name was Kaylie or Kylie. "Thanks a lot," she said. "It's not like there's a line or anything."

Everyone behind me muttered a collective expletive.

"I cleaned out my piggy bank," I said, attempting sarcasm.

"No kidding. Is it all here?" she asked, expelling a drawn-out sigh as she pushed the coins into groups of quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies.

"Sure."

"Whatever. I don't get paid enough for this." She swept the money into the cash drawer and slid my ticket under the window. "There are these things called credit cards…"

I grabbed the ticket. "Did you happen to see Vee Sky come in tonight?"

"Bee who?"

"Vee Sky. She's a sophomore. She was with Elliot Saunders."

Kaylie or Kylie's eyes bugged out. "Does it look like a slow night? Does it look like I've just been sitting here, memorizing every face that walks past?"

"Never mind," I breathed, heading for the doors leading inside.

Coldwater's movie theater has two screens, behind doors on either side of a concession counter. As soon as the ticket guy ripped my ticket in half, I tugged on the door to theater number two and ducked inside to darkness. The movie had started.

The theater was almost full, except for a few isolated seats. I walked down the aisle, looking for Vee. At the bottom of the aisle I turned and walked across the front of the theater. It was hard to distinguish faces in the darkness, but I was pretty sure Vee wasn't here.

I exited the theater and walked over to the show next door. It wasn't as crowded. I did another walk-through, but again, I didn't see Vee. Taking a seat near the back, I tried to settle my mind.

This whole night felt like a dark fair) tale I'd strayed into and couldn't find my way back out of. A fairy tale with fallen angels, human hybrids, and sacrificial killings. I rubbed my thumb over my birthmark. I especially didn't want to think about the possibility that I was descended from one of the Nephilim.

I pulled out the emergency cell phone and checked for missed calls. None.

I was tucking the phone in my pocket when a carton of popcorn materialized beside me.

"Hungry?" asked a voice from just over my shoulder. The voice was quiet and not especially happy. I tried to keep my breathing calm. "Stand up and walk out of the theater," Patch said. "I'll be right behind you."

I didn't move.

"Walk out," he repeated. "We need to talk."

"About how you need to sacrifice me to get a human body?" I asked, my tone light, my insides feeling leaden.

"That might be cute if you thought it was true."

"I do think it's true!" Sort of. But the same thought kept returning-if Patch wanted to kill me, why hadn't he already?

"Shh!" said the guy next to me.

Patch said, "Walk out, or I'll carry you out."

I flipped around. "Excuse me?"

"Shh!" the guy beside me hissed again.

"Blame him," I told the guy, pointing at Patch.

The guy craned his neck back. "Listen," he said, facing me again. "If you don't quiet down, I'll get security."

"Fine, go get security. Tell them to take him away," I said, again signaling Patch. "Tell them he wants to kill me."

"/want to kill you," hissed the guy's girlfriend, leaning around him to address me.

"Who wants to kill you?" the guy asked. He was still looking over his shoulder, but his expression was puzzled.

"There's nobody there" the girlfriend told me.

"You're making them think they can't see you, aren't you?" I said to Patch, awed by his power even as I despised his use of it.

Patch smiled, but it was pinched at the corners.

"Oh, jeez!" said the girlfriend, throwing her hands in the air. She rolled her eyes furiously at her boyfriend and said, "Do something!"

"I need you to stop talking," the guy told me. He gestured at the screen. "Watch the show. Here-have my soda."

I swung into the aisle. I felt Patch move behind me, unsettlingly close, not quite touching. He stayed that way until we were out of the theater.

On the other side of the door, Patch hooked my arm and guided me across the foyer to the ladies' room.

"What is it with you and girls' bathrooms?" I said.

He steered me through the door, locked it, and leaned back against it. His eyes were all over me. And they showed ever) sign of wanting to rattle me to death.

I was backed up against the counter, my palms digging into the edge. "You're mad because I didn't go to Delphic." I raised one shaky shoulder. "Why Delphic, Patch? It's Sunday night. Delphic will be closing soon. Any special reason you wanted me to drive to a dark, soon-to-be deserted amusement park?"

He walked toward me until he was standing close enough that I could see his black eyes beneath his ball cap.

"Dabria told me you have to sacrifice me to get a human body," I said.

Patch was quiet a moment. "And you think I'd go through with it?"

I swallowed. "Then it's true?"

Our eyes locked. "It has to be an intentional sacrifice. Simply killing you won't do it."

"Are you the only person who can do this to me?"

"No, but I'm probably the only person who knows the end result, and the only person who would attempt it. It's the reason I came to school. I had to get close to you. I needed you. It's the reason I walked into your life."

"Dabria told me you fell for a girl." I hated myself for experiencing irrational pangs of jealousy. This wasn't supposed to be about me. This was supposed to be an interrogation. "What happened?"

I desperately wanted Patch to give away some clue to his thoughts, but his eyes were a cool black, emotions tucked out of sight. "She grew old and died."

"That must have been hard for you," I snapped.

He waited a few counts before answering. His tone was so low, I shivered. "You want me to come clean, I will. I'll tell you everything. Who I am and what I've done. Every last detail. I'll dig it all up, but you have to ask. You have to want it. You can see who I was, or you can see who I am now. I'm not good," he said, piercing me with eyes that absorbed all light but reflected none, "but I was worse."

I ignored the roll in my stomach and said, "Tell me."

"The first time I saw her, I was still an angel. It was an instant, possessive lust. It drove me crazy. I didn't know anything about her, except that I would do whatever it took to get close to her. I watched her for a while, and then I got it in my head that if I went down to Earth and possessed a human body, I would be cast out of heaven and become human. The thing is, I didn't know about Cheshvan. I came down on a night in August, but I couldn't possess the body. On my way back to heaven, a host of avenging angels stopped me and ripped out my wings. They tossed me out of the sky. Right away I knew something was wrong. When I looked at humans, all I could feel was an insatiable craving to be inside their bodies. All my powers were stripped, and I was this weak, pathetic thing. I wasn't human. I was fallen. I'd realized I'd given it all up, just like that. All this time I've hated myself for it. I thought I'd given it up for nothing." His eyes focused singularly on me, leaving me feeling transparent. "But if I hadn't fallen, I wouldn't have met you."

My conflicting emotions weighed so heavily inside my chest, I thought they might suffocate me. Biting back tears, I forged ahead. "Dabria said my birthmark means I'm related to Chauncey. Is that true?"

"Do you want me to answer that?"

I didn't know what I wanted. My whole world felt like a joke, and I was the last one to get the punch line. I wasn't Nora Grey, average girl. I was the descendant of someone who wasn't even human. And my heart was smashing itself to pieces over another nonhuman. A dark angel. "Which side of my family?" I said at last.

"Your dad's."

"Where's Chauncey now?" Even though we were related, I liked the idea of him being far away. Very far away. Far enough that the link between us might not feel as real.

His boots were flush with the toes of my tennis shoes. "I'm not going to kill you, Nora. I don't kill people who are important to me. And you top the list."

My heart did a nervous flip. My hands were pressed against his stomach, which was so hard even his skin didn't give. I was keeping a pointless safeguard between us, since not even a towering electrical fence would make me feel secure from him.

"You're impinging on my private space," I said, inching backward.

Patch gave a barely-there smile. "Impinging? This isn't the SAT, Nora."

I tucked a few stray hairs behind my ears and took one sizable step sideways, skirting the sink. "You're crowding me. I need- room." What I needed were boundaries. I needed willpower. I needed to be caged up, since yet again I was proving I couldn't be trusted in Patch's presence. I should have been bolting for the door, and yet… I wasn't. I tried convincing myself I was staying because I needed answers, but that was only part of it. It was the other part I didn't want to think about. The emotional part. The part that was pointless fighting.

"Are you keeping anything else from me?" I wanted to know.

"I'm keeping a lot of things from you."

My insides took a steep dive. "Like?"

"Like the way I feel about being locked up in here with you." Patch braced one hand against the mirror behind me, his weight tipping toward me. "You have no idea what you do to me."

I shook my head. "I don't think so. This isn't a good idea. This isn't right."

"There's all kinds of right," he murmured. "On the spectrum, we're still in the safe zone."

I was pretty sure the self-preserving half of my brain was screaming, Run for your life! Unfortunately, blood roared in my ears, and I wasn't hearing straight. Obviously I wasn't thinking straight either.

"Definitely right. Usually right," Patch continued. "Mostly right. Maybe right."

"Maybe not right now." I sucked in some air. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a fire alarm drilled into the wall. It was ten, maybe fifteen feet away. If I was fast, I could cross the room and pull it before Patch stopped me. Security would come running. I'd be safe. And that's what I wanted… wasn't it?

"Not a good idea," Patch said with a soft shake of his head.

I bolted for the fire alarm anyway. My fingers closed on the lever and I pulled down to sound the alarm. Only, the lever didn't budge. As hard as I tried, I couldn't get it to move. And then I recognized Patch's familiar presence in my head, and I knew it was a mind game.

I swiveled around to face him. "Get out of my head." I stormed back and shoved hard against his chest. Patch took a step back, steadying himself.

"What was that for?" he asked.

"For this whole night." For making me crazy about him when I knew it was wrong. He was the worst kind of wrong. He was so wrong it felt right, and that made me feel completely out of control.

I might have been tempted to hit him square in the jaw had he not taken me by the shoulders and pinned me against the wall. There was hardly any space left between us, just a thin boundary of air, but Patch managed to eliminate it.

"Let's be honest, Nora. You've got it bad for me." His eyes held a lot of depth. "And I've got it bad for you." He leaned into me and put his mouth on mine. A lot of him was on me, actually. We touched base at several strategic locations down our bodies, and it took all my willpower to break away.

I pulled back. "I'm not finished. What happened to Dabria?"

"All taken care of."

"What exactly does that mean?"

"She wasn't going to keep her wings after plotting to kill you. The moment she tried to get back into heaven, the avenging angels would have stripped them. She had it coming sooner or later. I just sped things up."

"So you just-tore them off?"

"They were deteriorating; the feathers were broken and thin. If she stayed on Earth much longer, it was a signal to every other fallen angel who saw her that she'd fallen. If I didn't do it, one of them would have."

'Is she going to make-I dodged another one of his advances-another unwanted appearance in my life?"

"Hard to say."

Lightning quick, Patch caught hold of the hem of my sweater. He reeled me into him. His knuckles brushed the skin of my navel. Heat and ice shot through me simultaneously. "You could take her, Angel," he said. "I've seen both of you in action, and my bet's on you. You don't need me for that."

"What do I need you for?"

He laughed. Not abruptly, but with a certain low desire. His eyes had lost their edge and were focused wholly on me. His smile was all fox… but softer. Something just behind my navel danced, then coiled lower.

"Door's locked," he said. "And we have unfinished business."

My body seemed to have swept aside the logical part of my brain. Smothered it, in fact. I slid my hands up his chest and looped my arms around his neck. Patch lifted me at the hips, and I wrapped my legs around his waist. My pulse pounded, but I didn't mind one little bit. I crushed my mouth to his, soaking up the ecstasy of his mouth on mine, his hands on me, feeling on the verge of bursting out of my skin-

The cell phone in my pocket rang to life. I pulled away from Patch, breathing heavily, and the phone rang a second time.

"Voice mail," Patch said.

Deep in the recesses of my consciousness, I knew answering my phone was important. I couldn't remember why; kissing Patch had made every last harbored worry evaporate. I untangled myself from him, turning away so he wouldn't see how worked up ten seconds of kissing him had made me. Internally I was screaming with joy.

"Hello?" I answered, resisting the urge to wipe my mouth for smeared lip gloss.

"Babe!" Vee said. We had a bad connection, the crackle of static cutting across her voice. "Where are you?"

"Where are you? Are you still with Elliot and Jules?" I flattened a hand against my free ear to hear better.

"I'm at school. We broke in," she said in a voice that was naughty to perfection. "We want to play hide-and-seek but don't have enough people for two teams. So… do you know of a fourth person who could come play with us?"

An incoherent voice mumbled in the background.

"Elliot wants me to tell you that if you don't come be his partner-hang on-what?" Vee said into the background.

Elliot's voice came on. "Nora? Come play with us. Otherwise, there's a tree in the common area with Vee's name on it."

Pure ice flowed through me.

"Hello?" I said hoarsely. "Elliot? Vee? Are you there?"

But the connection was dead.