Page 1 of Hell and Halos

CHAPTER 1

Rage is a hard thing to reconcile when you're in the middle of the best moment of your life. It doesn't come through clean, either. It sits a bit. Stewin'. Wrapped up in the joy you're still experiencin' because that joy is now a fully formed thing that just arrived and has a life of its own.

You gotta kill the joy before the hate comes. It needs to die.

These two feelin's, they're a zero-sum game. Always have been. It's not a mash-up that can be reconciled. You're either one or the other.

The rage always wins. The anger. The hate.

How can it not?

There is no possible way to celebrate when fear is tryin' to smother you with a pillow.

So you stew. And you forget about the baby. About the mother of that baby, who you love with all your heart and who is so fuckin' perfect, you know damn well ya don't deserve her.

You carefully pack them up into little vintage suitcases. Make them an aesthetic. And then you put them on the shelf, high up in the closet. Safe, but out of sight. Which leads to out of mind.

And it's sad. That the moment was stolen from me. From us.

It's really fuckin' sad.

But there's somethin' left behind when you excise the joy. An emptiness. A dark void just beggin' to be filled.

So I do what one does. I fill it.

That's how I've spent the last two hours on this plane. Mournin' the loss of my joy and lettin' somethin' else take up the space.

It creeps in slow and quiet, the way cold comes through bad insulation. You don't notice it at first. And then you do. And then it's all you can feel.

The fury.

Buildin'.

Stackin' itself up like debt.

The sun is settin' over the Ashby ranch as the jet sets up for the landin'. It's nearly November now, so the grass is that dead, burnt-out brown that looks ugly unless you got somethin' around to blur the edges and blend it all together, the way artists do. Smudgy. Soft. And yet still exactly what it is—dry land that won't apologize for bein' itself.

I press my forehead against the window and I just look. That's all I can do right now. Just look.

Unlike the orange and tan jagged ridges and crests that dominate these parts, the hills on either side of the airstrip are grassy and roll-y. Mowed and manicured. Kept. The kind of kept that costs money and says so.

But behind all that prettiness, standin' like giant sentinels who didn't get the memo about bein' civilized, are the hoodoos and buttes. Old. Older than the Ashby name. Older than any claim anyone ever staked on any of this dirt. They don't move for money. They don't move for anyone.

Combine that with the autumn sunset bleedin' out across the whole sky and you got yourself a fuckin' masterpiece of lights and darks. Neat and nasty. Clean, manicured edges crashin' up against something that'll still be standin' long after every last one of us is in the ground.

The wheels touch down and the bounce is familiar in a way it shouldn't be because I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually experienced it.

Still, it's a signal.

Time to move.

Savannah feels it too. This urge to move. She's gatherin' her stuff. Her face sad. Eyes red, cheeks flushed from cryin'.

She blames herself for this mess. "He's only doin' this to hurt me," she'd said.

Which is partially true, I suppose.

But Marcus White didn't take my baby sister from Rimrock Academy because he's pining for Savannah Ashby.