“Okay,” she says, clearing her throat, “here’s the skinny: the northwest branch of the congregation has been meeting here since just after Wyoming officially became a state back in 1890. Right now there are about forty members.”

“So it’s not all Jackson people?”

She shakes her head. “They’re from all over the northwestern United States. But I did find out that Jackson is a kind of angel-blood hot spot, with the highest concentration of us living here than anywhere else in the area. I couldn’t get anybody to tell me why though. I have a theory that it’s the mountains, but that’s just a theory.”

“Okay, Miss Wikipedia,” I tease.

She grins, swats at me feebly, and then returns to the notebook. “Most of the angel-bloods here are Quartarius. There are only nine Dimidius, and they’re the leaders of the group.”

“Right. Because the Dimidius are so rare and special,” I say with a hefty dose of sarcasm.

Angela scoffs, but there’s an excited glitter in her eyes. Here, where most of the people are a mere quarter angel, Angela is a half. She is rare, and special, and all that.

“I’ve also noticed that everybody treats your mom differently than the others,” she adds.

“Like at the campfire, everyone always listened carefully to what she said, like she’s a font of wisdom or something, even though she didn’t talk very often.” It’s true. When Mom got up and said she was going to go to bed, everybody moved carefully out of her way as she passed. There was something about the way they responded to her, a particular kind of reverence.

“Maybe she’s their leader,” Angela says. “I think it’s a democracy here, but maybe she’s like the president.”

Man. How could she not tell me any of this?

“Are you okay?” Angela asks. “You look like you’re freaking out again.”

“Yeah, well. This isn’t exactly a place I expected to be when I woke up this morning, you know?”

“I know. I can’t believe Christian knew all about this, and he never told us,” she says, still peeved.

“Oh, lay off Christian. It’s not like you’re such an open book yourself,” I snap, using Christian’s words. “Hypocritical much?”

Angela sucks in a breath. Her jaw tightens. Then she tosses her long pigtails over her shoulders, snaps her journal closed, and lies down, putting her back to me. Off goes the flashlight.

We lie there in the dark, stars overhead, the whispering of trees. It’s way too quiet. Angela doesn’t say anything, but I can tell that she’s not asleep. Her breaths are shaky, and I know she’s mad.

“Ange . . . ,” I say when the silence grows unbearable. “You’re right, I’m sorry. I get so sick of it, too, all the secrets. Sometimes I feel like nobody in my life is completely straight with me, ever. It really ticks me off.”

“No, you’re right,” she says after a minute, her voice muffled by the sleeping bag.

“Christian never promised he’d tell us anything. This place is classified, I get that.”

“Did you just say I’m right?” I say as solemnly as I can manage.

“Yeah. So?”

“Nothing. I just wanted to write it down or something. In case I never hear you say that again.”

She turns slightly and shoots a grin over her shoulder. “Yeah, you should do that, since you’re unlikely to be right ever again.”

Fight officially over. Which is a relief, because Angela can be a royal pain in the behind when she’s angry.

“The secrecy is part of being an angel-blood,” she says right as I’m starting to fall asleep.

“You know that, right?”

“What?” I say groggily.

“We always have to hide ourselves. From the Black Wings, from the rest of the world.

Take your mom, for instance. She’s over a hundred, but she looks like she’s forty, which means all her life she’s had to keep moving so that people wouldn’t notice that she didn’t age naturally.

She always has to have a secret identity. After that long, the secrecy would become second nature, don’t you think?”

“But I’m her daughter. She can trust me. She should tell me about these things.”

“Maybe she can’t.”

I think about this for a minute, remember the fear I sensed from her earlier at the campfire.

Fear of what? I wonder. What’s so scary about us talking about hell? Besides the obvious, that is.

And why hasn’t she told the congregation about what happened with Samjeeza?

“Do you really think she’s the leader of the congregation?” I ask.

“I think it’s highly possible,” Angela says.

Then I realize something else: my mom knows Walter Prescott, Christian’s uncle. Which means that she probably knew from the day I came home and said his name that Christian was more than just a boy I had to rescue from a forest fire. All that time, she knew that Christian was an angel-blood. She knew that my purpose was more than a simple search and rescue.

She knew.

“Why didn’t she tell me?” I whisper. Suddenly I don’t feel so bad that I never told her about Angel Club.

“Just catching up now, are we?” Angela whispers back.

“I guess.”

“She could have a good reason,” Angela says.

“She’d better have a good reason,” I say.

It’s a long time before I fall asleep.

I dream of roses, white roses, the edges already starting to brown. I’m standing in front of a mound of freshly turned earth, staring down at Mom’s nice black pumps on my feet, and I’m holding roses. Their sweet scent fills my nose. I can sense the presence of other people around me, but I don’t look up from the dirt. This time, I don’t feel grief so much as I feel hollow inside.

Numb. The wind stirs my hair, blows it across my face, but I don’t brush it back. I stand there, holding the roses, staring at the grave.

Death is a transition, I try to tell myself, a passing from one plane of existence to another.

It’s not the end of the world.

That’s what Mom has always told me. But I guess that depends on how you define the end of the world.

The roses are wilty. They need water, and suddenly I can’t stand the thought of leaving them to dry up and die. So I crush them between my hands. I tear off their heads and then I let the petals sift through my fingers, falling oh so slowly, gently, onto the dark soil.