“It’s tempting.”

I twisted beneath him. I tried to roll to my right, then to my left. I finally figured out I was wasting a lot of energy and stopped. Patch settled his eyes on me. They were blacker than I’d ever seen them.

“I bet you like this,” I said.

“That would be a smart bet.”

I felt my heart pounding clear down in my toes. “Just do it,” I said in a challenging voice.

“Kill you?”

I nodded. “But first I want to know why. Of all the billions of people out there, why me?”

“Bad genes.”

“That’s it? That’s the only explanation I get?”

“For now.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” My voice rose again. “I get the rest of the story when you finally break down and kill me?”

“I don’t have to break down to kill you. If I’d wanted you dead five minutes ago, you’d have died five minutes ago.”

I swallowed at the less­than­cheerful thought.

He brushed his thumb over my birthmark. His touch was deceptively soft, which made it all the more painful to endure.

“What about Dabria?” I asked, still breathing hard. “She’s the same thing you are, isn’t she? You’re both—angels.” My voice cracked on the word.

Patch rotated slightly off my hips, but kept his hands at my wrists. “If I ease up, are you going to hear me out?”

If he eased up, I was going to bolt for the door. “What do you care if I run? You’ll just drag me back in here.”

“Yeah, but that would cause a scene.”

“Is Dabria your girlfriend?” I could feel each ragged rise and fall of my chest. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear his answer. Not that it mattered. Now that I knew Patch wanted to kill me, it was ridiculous that I even cared.

“Was. It was a long time ago, before I fell to the dark side.” He gave a hard smile, attempting humor. “It was also a mistake.” He rocked back on his heels, slowly releasing me, testing to see if I’d fight back. I lay on the mattress, breathing hard, my elbows propping me up. Three counts went by, and I hurled myself at him with all the force I had.

I shoved against his chest, but other than swaying back slightly, he didn’t move. I scrambled out from under him and took my fists to him. I hammered his chest until the bottoms of my fists began to throb.

“Done?” he asked.

“No!” I drove my elbow down into his thigh. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you feel anything?”

I rose to my feet, found my balance on the mattress, and kicked him as hard as I could in the stomach.

“You’ve got one more minute,” he said. “Get your anger out of your system. Then I take over.”

I didn’t know what he meant by “take over,” and I didn’t want to find out. I made a leaping run off the bed, with the door in sight. Patch snagged me midair and backed me against the wall. His legs were flush with mine, front to front down the length of our thighs.

“I want the truth,” I said, struggling not to cry. “Did you come to school to kill me? Was that your aim right from the start?”

A muscle in Patch’s jaw jumped. “Yes.”

I swiped a tear that dared escape. “Are you gloating inside? That’s what this is about, isn’t it? Getting me to trust you so you could blow it up in my face!” I knew I was being irrationally irate. I should have been terrified and frantic. I should have been doing everything in my power to escape. The most irrational part of all was that I still didn’t want to believe he would kill me, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t smother that illogical speck of trust.

“I get that you’re angry—,” said Patch.

“I am ripped apart!” I shouted.

His hands slid up my neck, searing hot. Pressing his thumbs gently into my throat, he tipped my head back. I felt his lips come against mine so hard he stopped whatever name I’d been about to call him from coming out. His hands dropped to my shoulders, skimmed down my arms, and came to rest at the small of my back. Little shivers of panic and pleasure shot through me. He tried to pull me against him, and I bit him on the lip.

He licked his lip with the tip of his tongue. “Did you just bite me?”

“Is everything a joke to you?” I asked.

He dabbed his tongue to his lip again. “Not everything.”

“Like what?”

“You.”

The whole night felt unbalanced. It was hard to have a showdown with someone as indifferent as Patch.

No, not indifferent. Perfectly controlled. Down to the last cell in his body.

I heard a voice in my mind. Relax. Trust me.

“Omigosh,” I said with a burst of clarity. “You’re doing it again, aren’t you? Messing with my mind.” I remembered the article I’d pulled up when I Googled fallen angels. “You can put more than words in my head, can’t you? You can put images—very real images—there.”

He didn’t deny it.

“The Archangel,” I said, finally understanding. “You tried to kill me that night, didn’t you? But something went wrong. Then you made me think my cell phone was dead, so I couldn’t call Vee. Did you plan to kill me on the ride home? I want to know how you’re making me see what you want!”

His face was carefully expressionless. “I put the words and images there, but it’s up to you if you believe them. It’s a riddle. The images overlap reality, and you have to figure out which is real.”

“Is this a special angel power?”

He shook his head. “Fallen angel power. Any other kind of angel wouldn’t invade your privacy, even though they can.”

Because other angels were good. And Patch was not.

Patch braced his hands against the wall behind me, one on either side of my head. “I put a thought in Coach’s mind to redo the seating chart because I needed to get close to you. I made you think you fell off the Archangel because I wanted to kill you, but I couldn’t go through with it. I almost did, but I stopped. I settled for scaring you instead. Then I made you think your cell was dead because I wanted to give you a ride home. When I came inside your house, I picked up a knife. I was going to kill you then.”

His voice softened. “You changed my mind.”

I sucked in a deep breath. “I don’t understand you. When I told you my dad was murdered, you sounded genuinely sorry. When you met my mom, you were nice.”

“Nice,” Patch repeated. “Let’s keep that between you and me.”

My head spun faster, and I could feel my pulse beating in my temples. I’d felt this heart­pounding panic before. I needed my iron pills. Either that, or Patch was making me think I did.

I tilted my chin up and narrowed my eyes. “Get out of my mind. Right now! ”

“I’m not in your mind, Nora.”

I bent forward, bracing my hands on my knees, sucking air. “Yes, you are. I feel you. So this is how you’re going to do it? Suffocate me?”

Soft popping sounds echoed in my ears, and a blurry black framed my vision. I tried to fill my lungs, but it was like the air had disappeared. The world tilted, and Patch slipped sideways in my vision. I flattened my hand to the wall to steady my balance. The deeper I tried to inhale, the tighter my throat constricted.

Patch moved toward me, but I flung my hand out. “Get away!”

He leaned a shoulder on the wall and faced me, his mouth set with concern.

“Get—away—from—me,” I gasped.

He didn’t.

“I—can’t—breathe!” I choked, clawing at the wall with one hand, clutching my throat with the other.

Suddenly Patch scooped me up and carried me to the chair across the room. “Put your head between your knees,” he said, guiding my head down.

I had my head down, breathing rapidly, trying to force air inside my lungs. Very slowly I felt the oxygen creep back into my body.

“Better?” Patch asked after a minute.

I nodded, once.

“Do you have iron pills with you?”

I shook my head.

“Keep your head down and take long, deep breaths.”

I followed his instructions, feeling a clamp loosen around my chest. “Thank you,” I said quietly.

“Still don’t trust my motives?”

“If you want me to trust you, let me touch your scars again.”

Patch studied me silently for a long moment. “That’s not a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t control what you see.”

“That’s kind of the point.”

He waited a few counts before answering. His voice was low, emotions untraceable. “You know I’m hiding things.” There was a question attached to it.

I knew Patch lived a life of closed doors and harbored secrets. I wasn’t presumptuous enough to think even half of them revolved around me. Patch lived a different life outside the one he shared with me.

More than once I’d speculated what his other life might be like. I always got the feeling that the less I knew about it, the better.

My lip wobbled. “Give me a reason to trust you.”

Patch sat on the corner of the bed, the mattress sinking under his weight. He bent forward, resting his forearms on his knees. His scars were in full view, the candlelight dancing eerie shadows across their surface. The muscles in his back heightened, then relaxed. “Go ahead,” he said quietly. “Keep in mind that people change, but the past doesn’t.”

Suddenly I wasn’t so sure I wanted this. On almost every level, Patch terrified me. But deep down, I didn’t think he was going to kill me. If that was what he wanted, he would have done it already. I glanced at his gruesome scars. Trusting Patch felt a lot more comfortable than slipping into his past again and having no idea what I might find.

But if I backed out now, Patch would know I was terrified of him. He was opening one of the closed doors just for me and only because I’d asked for it. I couldn’t make a request this heavy, then change my mind.

“I won’t get trapped in there forever, will I?” I asked.

Patch gave a short laugh. “No.”

Summoning my courage, I sat on the bed beside him. For the second time tonight, my finger brushed the peaked ridge of his scar. A hazy gray crowded my vision, working from the edges in. The lights went out.

CHAPTER 24

I WAS ON MY BACK, MY CAMI SPONGING UP MOISTURE beneath me, blades of grass poking the bare skin on my arms. The moon overhead was nothing more than a sliver, a grin tipped on its side.

Other than the rumble of distant thunder, all was quiet.

I blinked several times in succession, helping my eyes hurry and adapt to the scant light. When I rolled my head sideways, a symmetrical arrangement of curved twigs poking up from the grass solidified in my vision. Very slowly I pulled myself up. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the two black orbs staring at me from just above the curved twigs. My mind worked to place the familiar image. And then, with a horrific flash of recognition, I knew. I was lying next to a human skeleton.