How to Kill Yourself in a Small Town Read Online Free PDF Page B

out of the little
plastic tub.
    Then
I opened Tempie’s blog. Nothing new. The last entry was fifteen days old. The
title was “FINALLY!!!”
     
    My search is over. I’ve been
all over this country and even to Mexico looking for a way off of this mortal
coil of one reincarnated hell after another. I’ve finally found the one who can
take me out of this eternal rat race, and my angel was even closer to home than
I thought, right smack in the middle of northern Missouri. So, I guess there’s
no point to this blog anymore, except letting you know that you can get out,
too.
     
    The
first time I’d read this entry was two weeks ago, the day after Tempie posted
it. Since then, fifteen days’ worth of congratulatory comments from the people
who followed her blog had piled up. No responses from Tempie, though.
    Fifteen
days. I rubbed my eyes hard, thinking through the figures again.
    Everything
I’d read said foot soldiers couldn’t make familiars because they didn’t have
the power to inflict their essence on humans. Enforcers like Mikal wanted total
domination over their familiar’s will, but once they had it they moved on to
someone new fairly quickly—their average turnover was eighteen days. Alphas
like Mayor Dark wanted obedience, devotion, and affection. Some alphas kept
really well-trained familiars until their brain corroded from the constant
presence of the fallen angel’s essence. Average brain-corrosion-time? One
hundred and seventy-nine days with a wide range of normal, according to the
articles.
    I
could hope and pray that Tempie had met a foot soldier who was just stringing
her along with promises of making her his familiar, but Tempie knew too much
about fallen angels to be tricked like that. She had a whole page on her blog
dedicated to telling a smooth-talking foot soldier from an enforcer or an
alpha.
    If
I found Tempie and she was already a familiar, there wasn’t anything I could do
until her fallen angel let her go. The internet was full of stories about
people who tried to steal their enthralled loved ones back. Sometimes the
familiar killed the person trying to save them. Sometimes the person trying to
save the familiar—their sister or child or husband—ended up killing them
instead. “Death is the only release outside of the fallen angel’s will,” one
article had said.
    My
teeth hurt. I forced myself to unclench my jaw, then I got up to refill my
water and walk some tension off. I didn’t know that Tempie was already a
familiar. Maybe she wasn’t yet. Or maybe she’d changed her mind.
    I
slid back into my booth and scrolled through the previous entries on her blog,
trying not to think what the chances were that Tempie had changed her mind
about something for the first time in her life.
    There
was a picture of her new angel wings tattoo and a post about what she’d done
for the artist to get him to ink her for free. She had a week’s worth of Tip-a-Days
on how to get a fallen angel to notice you in a crowd of angel-groupies, her
reviews of the NP communities in Santa Barbara, Tucson, Fort Worth, and New
Orleans, and pictures of fallen angels she’d met along the way. Every so often,
she had a rant about the worthlessness of human men.
    After
a while, I gave up on Tempie’s blog and went to the message boards for people
whose family members had been enthralled. No new studies or helpful articles,
just the usual suicide-watch posts about dealing with cast-off familiars.
    One
guy had written, U gotta think creatively. NEthing can b a weapon n there
hands.
    Twelve
hundred and forty-one commenters backed that up with detailed examples. Some of
them made me sick, but I couldn’t stop reading. What if I didn’t read this one
about drain-cleaning liquid and it turned out Tempie was already a familiar and
then, when I finally got her home, she tried that?
    I
checked my eyes in the front window of the bakery. I didn’t look too much like
I was about to cry, but I did wonder how long I’d