“What a dumb question,” she said.
Lilith’s body language was shouting at him to stay back. He tried to respect that, but it was hard. He hated to see the rage that flooded her whenever she laid eyes on him.
It especially sucked because in his pocket were the prom tickets he’d bought for the two of them.
“There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you,” he said.
“You heard about Revenge,” she said. “You came to ask if you could be in the band.”
Cam couldn’t let her bluntness throw him off. He would take this nice and easy, even shoot for romantic, like he’d planned. “First of all, I want to say that I’m really glad you signed up to play at prom—”
“Can we please not call it prom?” Lilith said.
“You want to rename prom?” he asked. “It’s cool with me, but it might provoke a riot at Trumbull. Those kids are pretty excited. ‘Only ten days to go until the best night of our lives,’ and all that crap.”
“They’ll kick you off prom court if they catch you mocking it,” Lilith said. “It’s high school heresy.”
Cam smiled a little. So she had been listening when his name had been announced. “Is that all I have to do to get kicked off prom court?” he said. “Wait, I thought we weren’t calling it prom.”
Lilith thought for a moment. “Just so we’re clear, I’m going because I want to play music and hear the Four Horsemen, not because I want to wear my dream corsage or a cranberry satin maxidress.”
“I should hope not,” Cam said. “Cranberry is so last season.”
It looked, for an instant, like Lilith was going to smile, but then her eyes went cool again. “If you didn’t come about the band, why are you here?”
Ask her. What are you waiting for? He felt the tickets in his pocket, but for some reason Cam was frozen. The vibe wasn’t right. She’d say no. He’d better wait.
After a moment’s awkward silence, Lilith pushed past him and walked across her lawn to the battered minivan. She leaned in through the open door, pulled a lever, and stepped back as a metal platform unfolded and lowered to the driveway.
Lilith’s mother appeared on the front porch. She wore pink lipstick and a megawatt smile that concealed none of the exhaustion in her eyes. Her beauty had faded, but Cam could tell she’d once been a knockout, just like Lilith.
“Can I help you?” she asked Cam.
Cam opened his mouth to reply, but Lilith cut him off. “He’s just someone from school. He came to drop off some work.”
Her mother said, “School will have to wait. I need your help with Bruce right now.” She turned away from the door and reappeared a moment later pushing a wheelchair, and in the wheelchair was Bruce. He was trembling and looked frail. He coughed into a dishrag, his eyes watering.
“Hi, Cam,” Bruce called.
“I didn’t know your brother was sick.”
Lilith shrugged him off, going over to Bruce and running her fingers through his hair. “Now you do. What do you want, Cam?”
“I—” Cam started to say.
“Never mind. Of all the possible reasons you might have come here,” Lilith said, “I can’t think of a single one that matters.”
Cam had to agree. But what could he do—open his wings and tell her the truth, that he was a fallen angel who’d once broken her heart so deeply she’d never recovered? That the devil had assigned her to millennia of serial Hells? That her rage toward Cam ran so much deeper than anger about stolen song lyrics? That he would lose everything if he failed to win her heart again?
“Lilith, time to go,” her mother said, pulling the lever and then walking around to the driver’s seat. As the wheelchair rose into the back of the van, Bruce met Cam’s gaze and surprised him with a wink, as if to say, Don’t take things so seriously.
“Bye, Cam,” Lilith said as she closed the back doors behind her brother and got in on the passenger side.
“Where are you going?” Cam asked.
“The emergency room,” Lilith called out the window.
“Let me go with you. I can help—”
But Lilith and her family were already backing down the driveway. He waited until the van had turned the corner before letting his wings out again.
The sun was setting by the time Cam found them in the ER.
Lilith and her mom were asleep in a hallway, leaning against each other on stained orange chairs. He watched Lilith for a moment, marveling at her beauty and her stolen peacefulness.
He waited until the security guard left his post, then snuck back toward the rooms for patients. Cam peeked behind several curtains before he found the boy, sitting on a cot with his shirt off, oxygen tubes running through his nose, an IV hooked up to his arm. Bruce had been written in blue marker on a dry-erase board over his head.
“I knew you’d come,” he said, without turning away from the window.
“How’d you know that?”