“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.”

I dodged another one of his advances. “Is she going to make 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 hideand­seek 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.

CHAPTER 27

WHO WAS THAT?” PATCH ASKED.

My whole body was ringing. It took me a moment to answer. “Vee broke into the high school with Elliot and Jules. They want me to meet them. I think Elliot’s going to hurt Vee if I don’t go.” I looked up at Patch. “I think he’s going to hurt her if I do.”

He folded his arms, frowning. “Elliot?”

“Last week at the library I found an article that said he was questioned in a murder investigation at his old school, Kinghorn Prep. He walked into the computer lab and saw me reading it. Ever since that night, I’ve gotten a bad vibe from him. A really bad vibe. I think he even broke into my bedroom to steal the article back.”

“Anything else I should know?”

“The girl who was murdered was Elliot’s girlfriend. She was hanged from a tree. Just now on the phone he said, ‘If you don’t come, there’s a tree in the common area with Vee’s name on it.’“

“I’ve seen Elliot. He seems cocky and a little aggressive, but he doesn’t strike me as a killer.” He dipped into my front pocket and extracted the Jeep’s keys. “I’ll drive over and check things out. I won’t be long.”

“I think we should call the police.”

He shook his head. “You’ll send Vee to juvie for destruction of property and B and E. One more thing.

Jules. Who is this guy?”

“Elliot’s friend. He was at the arcade the night we saw you.”

His frown deepened. “If there was another guy, I would remember.”

He opened the door and I followed him out. A janitor wearing black slacks and a work­issue maroon shirt was sweeping bits of popcorn in the lobby. He did a double take at the sight of Patch exiting the ladies’ room. I recognized him from school. Brandt Christensen. We had English together. Last semester I’d helped him write a paper.

“Elliot is expecting me, not you,” I told Patch. “If I don’t show up, who knows what will happen to Vee? That’s a risk I’m not going to take.”

“If I let you come, you’ll listen to my instructions and follow them carefully?”

“Yes.”

“If I tell you to jump?”

“I’ll jump.”

“If I tell you to stay in the car?”

“I’ll stay in the car.” It was mostly true.

Out in the parking lot of the theater, Patch aimed his key fob at the Jeep, and the headlights blinked.

Suddenly he came to a halt and swore under his breath.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“Tires.”

I dropped my gaze and sure enough, both tires on the driver’s side were flat. “I can’t believe it!” I said.

“I drove over two nails?”

Patch crouched by the front tire, running his hand around the circumference. “Screwdriver. This was an intentional attack.”

For a moment I thought maybe this was another mind trick. Maybe Patch had his reasons for not wanting me to go to the high school. His feelings about Vee were no secret, after all. But something was missing. I couldn’t feel Patch anywhere inside my head. If he was altering my thoughts, he’d found a new way to accomplish it, because as far as I could tell, what I was seeing was real.

“Who would do that?”

He rose to his full height. “The list is long.”

“Are you trying to tell me you have a lot of enemies?”

“I’ve upset a few people. A lot of folks place bets they can’t win. Then they blame me for walking off with their car, or more.”

Patch walked one space over to a coupe, opened the driver’s side door, and took a seat behind the steering wheel. Reaching under it, his hand disappeared.

“What are you doing?” I asked, standing in the open doorway. It was a waste of breath since I was well aware of what he was doing.

“Looking for the spare key.” Patch’s hand reappeared, holding two blue wires. With some skill, he removed the ends of the wires and tapped them together. The engine turned over, and Patch looked out at me. “Seat belt.”

“I’m not stealing a car.”

He shrugged. “We need it now. They don’t.”

“It’s stealing. It’s wrong.”

Patch didn’t look the least bit troubled. In fact, he looked a little too relaxed in the driver’s seat. This isn’t the first time he’s done this, I thought.

“First rule of auto theft,” he said on a smile. “Try not to hang around the crime scene longer than necessary.”

“Hang on one minute,” I said, holding up a finger.

I jogged back to the theater. On my way inside, the glass doors reflected the parking lot behind me, and I saw Patch swing out of the coupe.

“Hi, Brandt,” I said to the boy still flicking popcorn into a long­handled dustpan.

Brandt looked up at me, but his attention was quickly drawn over my shoulder. I heard the theater doors open and sensed Patch move behind me. His approach wasn’t all that different from a cloud eclipsing the sun, subtly darkening the landscape, hinting of a storm.

“How’s it going?” Brandt said uncertainly.

“I’m having car trouble,” I said, biting my lip and trying on a sympathetic face. “I know I’m putting you in an awkward position, but since I helped you with that Shakespeare paper last semester …”

“You want to borrow my car.”

“Actually … yes.”

“It’s a piece of junk. It’s no Jeep Commander.” He looked right at Patch like he was apologizing.

“Does it run?” I asked.

“If by run you mean do the wheels roll, yeah, it runs. But it’s not for loan.”

Patch opened his wallet and handed over what looked like three crisp hundred­dollar bills. Reining in my surprise, I decided the best thing to do was play along.

“I changed my mind,” Brandt said, eyes wide, pocketing the money. He fished in his pockets and underhanded Patch a pair of keys.

“What’s the make and color?” Patch asked, catching the keys.

“Hard to tell. Part Volkswagen, part Chevette. It used to be blue. That was before it corroded to orange.

You’ll fill the tank up before you return it?” Brandt said, sounding like he had his fingers crossed behind his back, pressing his luck.

Patch peeled out another twenty. “Just in case we forget,” he said, stuffing it into the front pocket of Brandt’s uniform.

Outside, I told Patch, “I could have talked him into giving me his keys. I just needed a little more time.

And by the way, why do you bus tables at the Borderline if you’re loaded?”

“I’m not. I won the money off a pool game a couple nights back.” He pushed Brandt’s key in the lock and opened the passenger­side door for me. “The bank is officially closed.”

Patch drove across town on dark, quiet streets. It didn’t take long to arrive at the high school. He rolled Brandt’s car to a stop on the east side of the building and killed the engine. The campus was wooded, the branches twisted and bleak and holding up nothing but a damp fog. Behind them loomed Coldwater High.