Chapter One
“HEY, DEV?”
Devin squinted at the piece of code in front of him and frowned.
“Devil child!”
Well, that jerked him out of his computer-induced fugue.
“Huh?” he called back.
“I need a hand with something,” Angel yelled from downstairs.
Dev saved the code and rubbed his face. His eyes were hurting from all the intense staring and squinting he’d been doing for the last few hours. It was time for lunch, probably.
Leaving his computer on, he went to find his brother.
“What’s up, Angel baby?” he asked, plopping on the other end of the couch from where poor Angel sat wrapped in a blanket.
“I finally finished writing the thing, but it needs to be delivered on paper.” Expressive as Angel’s voice was, the first part of the sentence came out triumphant, while the latter quickly squished it again.
“Okay? You sure you can’t email your professor and have him accept it as an attachment? I mean, you’re too sick to go out. He should totally make an exception,” Dev reasoned.
“Any other professor, sure. It’s just that Kent does things a certain way, and everyone goes with it. It’s the price of his brilliance, I suppose,” Angel explained, waving a hand, then promptly dissolved into coughing his lungs out as if his body protested him moving at all.
“So you want me to drive to campus and hand-deliver it to Professor Kent?”
“Please? I wouldn’t ask if I really didn’t need you to.” Angel peered at him from the cocoon of blankets, and as always, Dev melted.
“You fucker with your big blue puppy-dog eyes. I hate you,” he lied, and gestured at the laptop. “Print it out. I’ll go and get changed.”
He got up and went to his room to figure out what to wear. Working from home had advantages, like not necessarily having to put on adult clothes. Going out was a whole other deal. He pulled on jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, then peered out of the window and deemed the weather good enough so he wouldn’t need a jacket.
“I think summer’s coming,” he told Angel when he picked up the printed pages from their very old yet trusty printer in the living room corner, which doubled as a miniature office for paying bills and printing stuff.
Angel looked at him with a serious expression that Devin hated. “Thanks, Dev. Really.”
Dev liked that his brother worried about his occasional anxiety around crowds, but he’d felt good lately. “It’s fine. I’m okay today. And I know the campus, so that helps. I’ll be fine,” he assured, then smirked. “But if I talk with Mom, I’m so letting her know you’ve had this cough for a week now.”
“Devil child!” Angel hissed and flipped him the bird.
“Well, you aren’t getting any better, so something needs to be done. And I’m not dragging a grown man to the doctor’s against his will, brother or not.” Devin pulled on his Chucks and saluted the mound of blankets on the couch. “I’ll grab some lunch somewhere while I’m out. Be back in a couple of hours at most.”
“Okay, I’ll warm up some soup and make grilled cheese or something. Have fun.”
THEY HADbeen born something like a few days apart, at least social services thought so. It was weird, how Devin and Angel had become brothers, but they had, and nobody was more important to Dev than Angel, and vice versa.
Dev drove their shared old Fiat to the campus and parked it in the first spot he found. He wasn’t too fussy about walking a bit more than necessary, especially after sitting down the whole morning.
These days, his anxiety didn’t bother him too much. New, crowded places sometimes freaked him out, but he’d built his life in such way that it made sense to him and thus calmed his anxiety. He wasn’t too concerned about going to find Angel’s mentor—the campus wasn’t foreign to him, even though he hadn’t gone to the offices before.
As if on cue, his cell rang just as he got out of the car.
“Hey, Mama,” he answered, smiling already.
“How’s my devil child today?” Her voice made his heart squeeze a little. Even after two years away from Anaheim, it felt weird to know she was so far away.
“I’m good, Mama. Walking on the campus as we speak,” he said casually, his evil side chuckling within.
