I got about five more miles closer to where we needed to be when someone odd caught my eye walking along the highway. We’d made it just past the merging lanes after the tollway before I noticed someone walking along the divider, and she looked kind of familiar. I pulled up beside her not long after I spotted her, and asked enervated, “Evelyn, what are you doing?”

Her face looked swollen in some parts, and there was bruising around her wrists. She looked up at me with a sad haggard face and said, “Um, going on an adventure, I guess?”

Concern etched its way onto my face, my brain creating a narrative that could make sense of what had happened to her. Glancing around, I said, “Get in. I don’t know where you’re going, but you’re coming with us now.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” she said holding up her hands. There were welts and marks along her palms and inner forearms, and a quiet surge of anger roared within me. I shook my head and said, “It wasn’t a question. Get in.”

She sighed, looking more tired as the seconds drew by, and she slid in beside Bond, who I could hear saying, “Oh, hello.”

“Evelyn, you remember Esteban and Joanna, right?” I asked, putting the car in drive and quickly jumping back onto the highway.

“Yeah, hey, how are you?” Evelyn responded quietly. I glanced at her from the rearview. She looked very tired and very broken. Evelyn didn’t have the cleanest hands of all the people I knew, but she still managed to remain optimistic and happy whenever we were together. Right now, I couldn’t even see a glimmer of any of that in her, and it made me worry. Not many things brought Evelyn down like this, but the things that did were very, very bad.

I stayed quiet as everyone soon fell asleep in the car. Mornings were not anyone’s forte, it seemed, but here I was anyways, making this five-hour journey to talk to some cultists. I had to let that sit and breathe in my head for a second as I actually processed what I had just thought.

I was driving five hours away from my home so I could talk to a group of people devoted to an angel of destruction. Wow. What did I get myself into? Frowning to myself, I sent a quick text to Vance. If all of this turned out to be real, then someone needed to know, someone who wasn’t in direct harm’s way. I got a text back, but I chose to focus on the road, the feeling of an even tug and pull of fear and shame set in. The fear and shame that I’d let myself feed into something that might not have been real. Maybe I just really hoped it wasn’t real.

“But you need to know for certain,” someone spoke from the back. My eyes flickered to the rearview, where Madison sat in the back, between Bond and Evelyn. She crossed her legs and arms, looked at me almost serenely.

“Of course I do,” I mumbled.

“Of course you do,” she repeated, “Because we all did. Her eyes flickered between Bond and Evelyn, and she said in a dire tone, “Someone here is going to hurt you. You only have yourself to trust right now, so good luck.”

“What? You can’t tell me?” I asked critically.

“I don’t know who it is. It’s never the same person,” she shrugged.

“Ah, of course. Typical,” I said, rolling my eyes. “When did my life become a story?”

Her eyebrows knit together. She asked, “Is that how you see it?”

“How else am I supposed to see it?”

She was quiet, staring on into the distance of her own life.

“Look at it however you can have it, then,” she said gravely. “But understand, if you lose someone, you don’t get them back, so be very careful.”

“Right, I can’t just hit restart or make some sort of fanfiction that satisfies my discontent,” I mumbled. “That’d be nice. Maybe then I could resolve myself and feel fine about who I am.”

Madison was silent for another moment, and I glanced back up to make sure she was there, and sure enough she was looking at me with a haunted look, and then she blinked out of sight. I looked back to the ongoing highway. What had I gotten myself into?

 

I drove along for about an hour and a half before I needed to switch out with someone. By that time, all of them had woken up at one time or another, but never at the same time. Jo had had a weird feeling from the time she woke up, and as she tried to describe it to me. I could feel the same unease creeping around us, like someone wasn’t supposed to be there. It was the sort of feeling that itched at the back of your neck. It only grew the longer we traveled. The feeling was enough to ignore, and eventually our conversation moved other places. We tried to understand other people’s actions. A lot of things people did, especially lately, seemed idiotic and redundant to cause the types of repercussions they caused in the name of selfish greed. Someone we spoke of was a girl who continued to cheat on her boyfriend regardless of who watched and who she hurt. All she’d do was keep lying to him, and he knew, but he still went with it.

“Loneliness is terrifying,” I murmured. “No one actually wants to be alone.”

“I do,” Jo quipped up.

“Do you?” I asked, glancing at her. “Then you’re with George for why?”

“He’s different,” she said with a smirk.

“Of course he is,” I snickered. She eventually fell back asleep, and then I was in silence, still wondering about the reality of these things. That feeling of unease didn’t sway any, but instead added a dark, nightmarish feeling to my thoughts. Bond woke up next, and he stayed up for a while, talking about his writing and mine, how he wanted to explore these different kinds of realities through his writing.

“Like, I found out through writing, that my biggest fear is my wife dying giving birth to our child.”

“That’s pretty heavy dude,” I said, my eyes widening slightly.

“Quite.”

“And . . . where does this come from?”

“I really couldn’t tell you, man. Of all these different scenarios I come up with and everything I’ve seen happen today, that is still my biggest, unexpected realistic fear.”

“I mean; I guess it makes sense for people like us. My biggest fear is that I can’t conceive,” I mumbled. “If not that, than something were to happen to my children. What would become of me? What’s to say we were here? What’s to become of us and our purpose?”

“Would you say children give us purpose?”

“I don’t really see why not,” I shrugged. “Not to say that you can’t have your own purpose outside of having kids, but it’s like, once you have them, they become your purpose. Most of the time they’re supposed to, at least,” I added, gesturing to him. Neither Bond nor Jo had good parental figures in their lives. I didn’t quite understand how bad it could be being raised by selfish people. My parents had made it known to me early on that they had, in one sense or another, each chosen to devote most of their life to me.

“But oddly enough, there are so many people who choose to be terrible,” I murmured.

“Very true.” He dissolved into his phone a few minutes later, and then to sleep a few more minutes after that. When Evelyn woke up, she didn’t speak when she saw me. She instead chose to look at her phone the whole time she was awake. Every time I looked away from her, it was as if I could feel her staring at me. Making a face inwardly, I forced the unease into a box in the back of my head. She was probably in a mood since whatever had happened before I had gotten to her. Evelyn wasn’t bad. She wouldn’t hurt me. If anything, I should have felt the need to protect her. Evelyn wouldn’t hurt me. I frowned to myself the whole time she was awake. Realistically thinking, I figured she would be the one I’d have to keep an eye on, and the immediate second thought was how was I really going to protect myself against her. If she was truly dangerous and not who she was, then in what ways? How would I protect myself against someone who might know how to break my neck without me knowing, or who could poison me discreetly, or just outright beat me to death?

“Evelyn, what were you doing walking around on the highway?” I asked, attempting to break the silence. She looked up, unmoved by the question. At first, her expression was emotionless, and then as if remembering what had happened, a look of angst and distress overtook her face. Knitting her brows together and casting her eyes down, she answered, “Um, I really don’t want to talk about it.”

“Aw, that’s okay,” I murmured to her, looking back at the highway. What if she wasn’t bad? What if she was just another victim of circumstance, like I had seen her today? Still, I couldn’t shake this feeling that she was harboring something behind that wall of hers. She’d never really let it down since we’d met, and that was strange to me. If people didn’t immediately drop their guard around me, it never took long for them to eventually lower, but not Evelyn. I suppose I’d given up on trying to fully understand her, but I was slowly starting to see this admirable and endearing security as a disguise to conceal something more . . . nefarious?

I drove on in silence until she fell back asleep, and then not long after that, I pulled over.

I couldn’t keep driving. I hopped out of the car and stretched my back, long and hard, the pain suspiciously light. The feeling of parking woke everyone up, and I asked, “Who wants to drive now?”

Bond answered, “Yeah, I got you.”

“Wonderful,” I groaned, leaning far to one side. “You guys can get some food if you’re hungry.”

Evelyn and Jo took off quickly, and Bond asked, “You aren’t hungry?”

“Eh, I am, but I don’t feel like spending money right now.”

“I think you should still eat something.”

“Mm,” I mumbled, stretching out in the backseat, “I’ll think about it.”

“How much further do we have to go, anyway?” Bond asked, looking up at the early morning sun.

“Ah, about another two hours. We can swap back out whenever you’re ready,” I said, throwing an arm over my face. “Go get some coffee so I won’t have to.”

He snickered, said, “Okay, asshole. Want anything?”

“Your dignity on a silver plate and that attitude in a box,” I smirked.

“Got it. Black coffee.”

“Just like my soul,” I called as I heard his footsteps recede. My mind drifted over to Vance. I wondered what he was doing, or what he would think about all of this. He was generally supportive of my more reckless decisions. Would it be so much to ask him to believe that I might be involved in some sort of strange and wayward supernatural phenomenon?

Vance . . . I found myself craving his presence. Something about being around him put me more at ease than I’d ever been with anyone else. There was something about him that put things in their right place, and I wanted him to be mine. I’d had many days where I’d wake up feeling like everything was off. There were those days where everything seemed slightly moved out of place, or as if my skin didn’t fit quite right. Like a shirt too tight around the sleeves. Then I’d have days where I felt like an outsider to the world. I’d wake up and feel as if the world were trying to tell me I was different, that I didn’t belong there. These days were the oddest. I was always on guard, prepared for someone, or something to readily purge me from this reality and put me back in the one I belonged to. I never knew where I really belonged.

The nice, wonderful, amazing thing about Vance, though, was that despite these weird feelings, these discomforts in reality—and he’d seen me through many of these moods—he made it okay. The circumstances I found myself in didn’t really seem so bad if he was near me. In fact, he often melted these feelings away. I could feel them dissolving the longer I was near him, but I wasn’t near him now, and there was this consistent unease floating just beneath the surface of my outer calm. Something did not feel right. This was not going to change. What did change was the sudden wind against my skin.

With a start, I realized I was dreaming. When I opened my eyes, I saw that I was flying high in the sky. No, I wasn’t really flying. I was airborne, but I was more floating than anything, and I was very slowly descending back to the ground. I was looking for someone. I could see all the people from the ground, and I was searching for a single woman who was sprinting towards the forest. I tucked in my wing and torpedoed down through the sky to her. She was running inhumanly fast, but I’d already found her, and there was no escaping from me once I’d found my target.

I crashed right in front of her, my hand reaching out and crushing her neck in my grip. She gagged as I lifted her off the ground. The woman had short dark hair and pale skin, but there was something off about her. I’d seen her before, but I couldn’t place her. It was like I’d seen her face many times, but the familiarity that followed recognition was not there. She fought savagely against my vice-like grip, and I loosened my hand just enough so she could speak.

“Where is my wing?” I asked in a low and menacing tone.

“How should I know?” she hissed, still fighting against my grip.

“I am only ever where I am because it is where my wing has been, and you have its residue all over you,” I shot back.

“Its residue? What the hell?” the woman asked, slowing her struggle just enough for her face to register.

“I don’t have time for your games,” I snapped abruptly, tearing the pieces apart as they threatened to come together, “Where is my wing?”

“Oh,” she laughed, remembering then who I was just as I remembered who she was. “She’s long gone.”

“She?” I asked incredulously. There were black veins slithering through her brown eyes, and I could finally see them. The person I was, the angel, already knew what was wrong with her, knew that she wasn’t the person she was before.

“Wow. After all these years, you never figured out your wing was a person?” the woman asked, genuinely dumbstruck.

“My wing is a person? What does that mean?”

“Your wing is a person, idiot. What else does that mean?”

“I can only assume it means someone has it,” I said simply. “Thank you for your honesty.”

“Wait, no I have a kid!” the woman screamed, but before she could say anymore, I had already crushed her neck in my hand, her head lolling brokenly to the side. I dropped her body and crouched down beside her. Her eyes were still staring up and out, and a black tear slid from her reddened eyes, the black veins looking more like claws against the red of her eyes. Ripping open her shirt, I carved the mark of my people. A triangle with a wing. Dark, diseased blood pooled beneath the blade, and once I’d finished, I looked up. How many of my sins had they witnessed, now? Did they know the reasons I did what I did? Maybe that was why they had never sent for my retrieval. But the time for questions had long since passed. It was time for action, now.

I jolted awake in the back seat of the car, feeling the heat of her blood on my hands.

“Are you good?” Jo asked, startled. I looked over at her, a little confused. Evelyn was in the front and Bond was driving steadily, staring at me from the rearview mirror.

“Yeah, yeah,” I finally answered, clearing my throat. “I think I killed Ms. Ronson.”

“Ms. Ronson?” Jo asked.

“Yeah, uh, the one from back in second grade,” I said, shaking slightly and rubbing thegoosebumps from my skin.

“Huh,” Jo said slowly.

“Yeah, where are we?” I asked quickly, not wanting to think about it anymore.

“We should be there in about fifteen minutes,” Bond answered, turning down a road I’d never seen before in a city I’d never been.

“I was asleep for two hours?”

“Yeah, you were knocked out,” Jo chimed in.

“How’s your back by the way?” Bond asked.

“Ah, right, my back. I forgot about it,” I said with a slight frown. “I don’t know; I guess it’s healed.”

“You want me to check?” Jo asked.

“Yeah, sure,” I responded, going to remove my shirt. A second later, I could feel her cool hands tracing lines along my back, right over where the bruising should have been.

“It’s actually almost gone. When did you get this mark, though?”

“Oh, that?” I said quickly. “Always been there.” Evelyn wasn’t specifically looking at me, but I could feel something about her demeanor had been piqued by Jo’s mentioning of the mark.

“Mm,” she responded, picking up on my silent nudges and cues. I’d known Jo since we were in first grade. We’d spent more time together than I had other parts of my family, and I was glad that she knew me well enough to know when I needed to hide something, and it felt as if this information—the mark on my back—was something I shouldn’t voice.

“We’re here,” Bond announced.