Chapter 5
CHAPTER
FIVE
The road to hell was paved with good intentions—and chickens.
Gabriel watched as Phin furiously swiped at a chicken as he tried to collect eggs, doing his best not to harm the feathered fiend. The chicken squawked, wings flapping as it renewed its attack from the other direction, pecking at Phin’s trailing boot laces.
The big man was hunched over, jaw working, as he plucked feathers and debris from his sleeves, dropping the eggs into his pockets.
Tommy normally did everything with the chickens; they didn’t seem to mind when he came traipsing through.
Hell, they practically deposited the eggs directly in his pockets.
Gabriel half expected them to do it with a song.
But today Tommy was helping Blake with something, so Phin had volunteered. Not so much in words, Phin didn’t do that. But he was in there collecting the eggs and cleaning up the coop, trying his best not to strangle the birds Tommy loved so much.
“Wipe that look off your face,” Phin snapped, not taking his eyes off the hen he was trying to move off the last pile of eggs.
Gabriel chuckled. “I’m just sitting here.”
Phin finally gave up, stomping over to where Gabriel was sprawled out in a pool chair. He dropped beside him onto a lounger, his arms crossed, and nose buried in his jacket. “Just because you’re named after an angel doesn’t make you innocent.”
“Actually, I was named after an uncle.”
“I will push you in the river. Don’t test me.” Phin’s voice was muffled, but the threat was clear. Gabriel had heard worse, but he wouldn’t push. Not when there was a feather stuck in Phin’s hair.
They lapsed into a silence, both content to stew in their own thoughts. What Phin was thinking, Gabriel couldn’t even guess. Maybe he should ask. As commander, he had to know where his team’s heads were at.
But at the moment, he wasn’t sure he had the right. He was too preoccupied. Mostly with Blake.
They’d spent an amazing evening together. It was perfect. Gabriel was usually a grounded kind of guy, but he was proud of himself for that. It hadn’t been easy to set up, harder still to admit just how badly he’d fucked up, and how close he was to losing Blake. How important he’d become to Gabriel.
While they were in that dusty Victorian home, Blake’s eyes shone with that quick wittedness Gabriel had come to love so much. He laughed. Not the soft huffs of derision but genuine, full-bellied laughs.
And he kissed so freely—tasting like chocolate, melting snow, and forever.
Then they came back to the motel, and it was like the second he stepped over the paint in the parking lot, it all came back.
Blake’s eyes shuddered, and the only trace that he’d been gone were the bruises Gabriel had left on his skin.
He didn’t turn away from Gabriel, but that night he’d burrowed under the covers and didn’t say a word—not even when Gabriel tried to reach him by asking him about the books he’d brought back.
It left a pit in Gabriel’s stomach, a simmering anxiety he didn’t know what to do with.
For all of Gabriel’s faults, he almost always knew what the next move was.
How to make a situation better, or at least not worse.
The army taught him to think logically, to compartmentalize, but how could he when the things he was trying to compartmentalize were the things keeping him from losing his godamn mind?
And it wasn’t just Blake, although Gabriel would be chagrined to admit he was the most pressing.
No, Gabriel’s entire team was holding on by a thread.
Phin was lying through his teeth about his knee.
Victoria was strung so tight she could form her own one-woman band.
She was a good soldier, but her training was in aviation.
And as a perfectionist, good wasn’t enough. Not by a long shot.
And Judd was…well, Judd was probably missing some vaccinations or a harness that said Do Not Pet, but for as loud as he was, he kept his true feelings close to the chest. He hid everything behind big smiles and probing jokes.
Gabriel didn’t know what a Judd-shaped implosion would look like, but he was certain he didn’t want to find out.
None of which he could do anything about. Rubbing his eyes, he glanced over at Phin. He was staring at the cracked concrete between his boots, hands in his pockets.
“You, okay?” Gabriel asked, knowing it was the wrong thing to say, but he didn’t have anything better.
Phin glared at the ground. “You know the difference between a soldier and a civilian?”
Gabriel grinned despite himself. “Civilians ask questions?”
The big man grunted but didn’t look over at Gabriel. “I’m shit. You’re shit. Everything is shit.”
“Sorry, I asked.”
Phin’s lips twitched, as close to a smile as Gabriel had gotten in a long time. He’d count it as a win.
After a long moment, Phin asked, “Were you ever the praying kind?”
“I thought soldiers didn’t ask questions?”
“The river is right there.”
Gabriel chuckled and then shrugged. “Maybe as a kid.” Gabriel had some memories of kneeling beside his bed, hands clasped. More a habit than anything his academically inclined parents had pushed. “But I didn’t think God was the biggest fan of gays.”
Phin snorted. “Bigots hate. God loves.” He was so certain. Spoken with the confidence of someone who had spent a considerable amount of time thinking about it.
Gabriel hadn’t. Religion had never taken up much real estate in his mind.
Maybe because it wasn’t important to his family, or maybe because he’d heard one homophobic woman in a pantsuit on a Sunday too many.
Or hell, maybe Gabriel had enough reasons to hate himself without giving an asshole the satisfaction.
But this was important to Phin. Gabriel didn’t know why, but he could see it in the way he pressed his lips together, or the way his shoulders crept up toward his ears. Like he was readying himself for a fight.
“I used to pray a lot. Before.” Phin said. “And now I’m left wondering if all that praying for change brought all this.”
Gabriel blinked. “You think your prayers brought the aliens?”
“You got a better explanation?”
He didn’t. But there was something about Phin—big, quiet Phin—admitting that he thought his prayers brought this apocalypse, and that didn’t sit right with Gabriel.
He’d never heard Phin talk about religion.
Not even in basic before the stuff they’d seen and done changed everything about them.
It was the kind of defeatist talk that got men killed.
Holding on by a thread.
Pushing himself to his feet, Gabriel began making his way toward Irving’s office. He wanted to tell Phin he was right—everything was shit. But he wasn’t sure if admitting there was a vindictive deity who punished a kid’s prayers for change was worse than there being nothing at all.
What Gabriel did know, what he’d known since he woke up on the bathroom floor covered in sick and shame, was that sobriety was a marathon that started with a single step. Change started with a single step.
Gabriel arrived at Irving’s office to find he was not the only person at the motel who wanted to yell at him. Alvarez’s voice carried from the lobby doors, echoing around the nearly empty room.
Judd glanced up at him as he walked in. He was cleaning up after lunch, bent over to scrub a table.
Being the way he was, it would be easy to forget that Judd grew up with four sisters and was fastidious about cleaning up.
He once told Gabriel that as the youngest, he always got the worst chores and had developed an affinity for them.
Judd also told him he would lie for his sisters when they snuck out to meet their boyfriends, and they’d pay him in beer and fast food, so he supposed it evened out.
He caught Judd’s eye and nodded toward the office with a raised eyebrow. Judd just shrugged.
Gabriel moved around the front desk, ready to knock, but the door was open.
“We wasted weeks waiting on Lennox’s team! And for what? Three days! That’s all the information they got. How does that help us?”
He had to hand it to Alvarez; at least he was consistent with his criticism.
“You think you could have done better?”
The soldier turned quickly, his dark eyes narrowing on Gabriel as he stepped through the door.
Alvarez was shorter than Gabriel, but wider, and about ten years younger.
He was handsome with his dark eyes and thick brows.
In another life, he probably dressed nicely too.
Maintained his haircut and took care of his body.
Now, he was relegated to whatever they could scavenge that fit him.
The latest coat was this purple monstrosity that looked like it came straight from the nineties.
It was the highlight of Gabriel’s week when Alvarez had to put that on.
Which, in retrospect, probably didn’t endear him to the soldier.
“I do,” Alvarez answered, squaring up his shoulders.
He was looking right through Gabriel, his eyes narrowed in on a spot above Gabriel’s nose.
It was a tell he probably didn’t realize he had.
Something he picked up from the army, when a higher-up was just looking for a reason to single you out.
Eye contact was bad. Looking away was worse.
A lot of guys developed the stare through. Gabriel sure had.
It was how the army raised you. Broke you down until you were nothing, and if you survived it, they built you back up. There were few people Gabriel couldn’t look in the eye now. Took a while, though.
Time Alvarez might not have.