Landing by J Bennett

all the alleyways he had lined up for the night. God, it took
me over an hour. I kept texting, calling, and nothing.” Gabe’s voice wavers,
and he takes a shaky breath to steady himself. I admire the effort, but he
can’t mask his aura like his brother can. It lights up with thick streaks of
pained red and moves in choppy waved around him.
    The song of my hunger is loud in
the room. I concentrate to separate Gabe’s voice from the heady melodies.
    “I found an alley with two bodies
in it,” Gabe continues. “One of them was Tarren. He wasn’t moving. Maya, I
thought he was dead.” Gabe turns toward me, forgetting the rabbit on his chest.
“Oh shit.” He quickly repositions Sir Hopsalot so that the rabbit is in the
crook of his arm.
    “He wasn’t moving,” Gabe continues,
“and there was this second where, it’s like, I could feel the world breaking
apart under my feet. Like, there was nothing left. That doesn’t make any
sense.”
    “It does,” I whisper. Ryan,
Avalon.
    “I went ballistic, grabbing
Tarren’s shirt, yelling. Totally stupid, right, but his eyes opened, and that
was, oh god, I just started laughing. Don’t know why, adrenaline or something.
Tarren, he like, I mean the guy can’t even move, and he’s telling me to be
quiet, that I’m drawing attention. But it was music to my ears. He could barely
walk. It took us forever to get to the car, and then he slept for two days
straight.”
    “What about the other body? In the
alley?” I ask.
    “Oh yeah, I checked on him too. Not
quite the same dramatics. He was dead. Drained to the very last drop. Tarren
must have tried to rescue the guy or something.”
    “That doesn’t make sense,” I prop
myself up on my elbow. “The angel wasn’t in the alley when you found Tarren? It
just let him go after it started feeding?” I think about the terrible,
animalistic need that scourges my brain when I feed, how my reason — my very self
— is burned away in those few moments of total quiet. I could never stop myself
in the middle of feeding.
    Gabe considers this. “Tarren didn’t
remember anything. There was some blood in the alley and shell casings. I think
he managed to get some shots off and injure the fucker, or maybe it heard me
coming and fled.”
    “But you said Tarren wasn’t
checking in for an hour before that.”
    “I don’t know Maya. I thought about
it some, and I can’t figure it out. Maybe it was a miracle.”
    I almost laugh, but I can tell
Gabe’s being serious. I’ve got a barbed reply ready on my tongue — something
about how gracious God’s been to this family so far — but I hold it back.
    “Maybe,” I tell my brother.
    “The murders stopped for a while,
but two months later we were back in Vegas, and that’s when we capped Lo’s
father. Strange though,” Gabe says. “Tarren thinks it was the same guy both
times, but I don’t know. Kill pattern was different. Real different.”
    “Strange,” I murmur.
    “And that’s why we don’t split up
anymore,” Gabe says with finality.
    I think about the story for a while
but can’t parse any more logic from it than Gabe. I wonder if there is any
possible way to speak to Tarren about this without earning a dark scowl and
smothering silence.
    It takes Gabe a while after that to
fall asleep, but eventually his mind lets go of those haunted memories, and his
aura lapses into smooth, drifting tides. Gabe always sleeps well. Not like me,
and not like Tarren, who often falls in and out of sleep roughly and sometimes
doesn’t bother at all.
    Tonight I close my eyes and follow
the rhythms of Tarren’s energy through the thin wall that separates our rooms.
His aura putters fretfully for the next hour until it spikes high and pained. I
can actually hear him start awake and fall back with a miserable sigh.
    The nightmares. They always get
worse when we’re on the road.
    And Tarren doesn’t know it — would
probably scowl something awful if he did — but I sit up in my