Beautiful Chaos(119)

“Dude, are you okay?” I turned slowly toward the sound of his voice. Link was standing at the base of the tree, staring up at me. Lena was beside him, completely panicked.

“I’m trapped in a tree. What do you think?”

Relief spread across Lena’s face.

“I think I just saved your ass with my superpowers.” Link was grinning.

“Ethan, can you get down?” Lena asked.

“Yeah. I don’t think anything’s broken.” I untangled my legs from the branches carefully.

“I can rip you down,” Link offered.

“No, thanks. I got it.” I was afraid of where I might end up if he gave it another shot.

It hurt every time I moved, so it took me a few minutes to climb down. As soon as I hit the ground, Lena threw her arms around me. “You’re okay!”

I didn’t want to mention that if she squeezed me any tighter, I wouldn’t be. I could already feel what little energy I had left draining out of me. “I think so.”

“Hey, you two are heavier than you look. And it was my first time. Cut me some slack.” Link was still grinning. “I did save your lives.”

I held out my fist. “You did, man. We’d be dead if it wasn’t for you.”

He tapped his knuckles against mine. “I guess that makes me a hero.”

“Great. Now your head’s gonna be even bigger, if that’s possible.” He knew what I was really saying—thanks for saving my ass and the girl I love.

Lena hugged him. “Well, you’re my hero.”

“I did sacrifice the Beater.” Link looked over at me. “How bad was it?”

“Bad.”

He shrugged. “Nothin’ a little duct tape can’t fix.”

“Hope you’ve got a lot of it. How did you find us, anyway?”

“You know how they say animals can sense tornados and earthquakes and stuff like that? Guess it’s the same for Incubuses.”

“The earthquake,” Lena whispered. “Do you think it made it to town?”

“It’s already hit,” Link said. “Main Street split open right down the middle.”

“Is everyone okay?” I meant Amma, my dad, and my hundred-year-old aunts.

“I dunno. My mom took a mess a people down to the church, and they’re holed up in there. She said somethin’ about the foundation and the steel in the beams and some show she saw on the nature channel.” Leave it to Mrs. Lincoln to rescue everyone on her street with educational programming and a talent for ordering people around. “When I left, she was screamin’ about the apocalypse and the seven signs.”

“We have to get to my house.” We didn’t live as close to church as Link did, and I was pretty sure Wate’s Landing wasn’t built to withstand earthquakes.

“There’s no way. The road split right behind me as soon as I turned off a Route 9. We’re gonna have to go through Perpetual Peace.” It was hard to believe Link was volunteering to go into the cemetery at night, in the middle of a supernatural earthquake.

Lena put her head on my shoulder. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

“Yeah? Well, I’ve had a bad feelin’ since I got back from Neverland and turned into a Demon.”




When we walked through the gates of His Garden of Perpetual Peace, it was anything but peaceful. Even with the glowing crosses, it was so dark I could barely see. The lubbers were going nuts, buzzing so loud that it sounded like we were in the center of a wasps’ nest. Lightning cut through the darkness, cracking the sky the way the earthquake had cracked the earth.

Link was leading the way, since he was the only one who could see much of anything. “You know, my mom’s right about one thing. In the Bible, it says there’ll be earthquakes at the end.”

I looked at him like he was nuts. “When was the last time you read the Bible? In Sunday school, when we were nine?”

He shrugged. “Just sayin’.”

Lena bit her bottom lip. “Link could be right. What if Abraham didn’t cause this, and it’s a result of the Order being broken? Like the heat and the bugs and the lake drying up?”

I knew she felt responsible, but this wasn’t caused by a Mortal End of Days. This was a supernatural apocalypse. “And Abraham just happened to be reading about cracking open the earth to let all the Demons out?”

Link looked over at me. “What do you mean, lettin’ the Demons out? Lettin’ them outta where?”

The ground started to tremble again. Link stopped, listening. It seemed like he was trying to determine where the quake was coming from, or where it would hit next. The rumbling changed to a creaking sound, as if we were standing on a porch that was about to collapse. It sounded like a thunderstorm underground.

“Is another one going to hit?” I couldn’t decide if it was better to run or stand still.

Link looked around. “I think we should—”

The ground underneath us seized, and I heard the asphalt splitting. There was nowhere to go, and not enough time to get there, anyway. The asphalt was crumbling around me, but I wasn’t falling down. Pieces of the road were jutting up toward the sky.

They scraped against each other, forming a crooked concrete triangle, until they stopped. The glowing crosses started flickering out.