Angel Burn (26 page)

But meanwhile, even through the daze of details that surrounded him, he had begun to notice things. . . .

Just little things at first, such as how often Raziel vanished from his office and how satisfied with himself the angel often seemed on his return. And the residential devotees: often now he seemed to spot one or another gazing up at nothing, smiling. Jonah knew that they were communing with the angels at these times, and before the vague feeling of unease had come over him, he’d never even questioned this. But it was happening so often. And the devotees usually seemed so tired afterward. Once, passing a woman staring up at nothing in a corridor, Jonah spoke to her and received no answer. Gazing at her radiant, unseeing eyes, an uncomfortable feeling came over him; he ducked his head down and continued on his way. When he glanced back, he saw her standing slumped against the wall, her face pale.

Jonah wavered and then went over to her, his footsteps hardly making a sound on the thick carpet. “Are you all right?” he asked.

The devotee’s eyelids came open. Her expression was shining, joyful. “Oh, yes! One of the angels has just been with me. Praise the angels!”

“Praise the angels,” echoed Jonah.

But the woman staggered slightly as she started down the corridor again; he saw her touch the wall for support. She looked so drained. So weak.

In fact, so did many of the devotees.

How had he never noticed before? It seemed incredible to Jonah, as if he were now viewing cathedral life with a new pair of eyes. Thousands of resident devotees lived in nearby accommodation; they took care of every need that the flagship Church of Angels center had, from cleaning to cooking to paperwork. They had a gym, a movie theater, a hair salon  . . .  but their most popular amenity seemed to be the doctor’s office. Glancing through some of the personnel files on his screen, Jonah felt a chill. Not a single resident seemed to be healthy.

Yet surely it was just a coincidence. Or not a coincidence, exactly, but simple cause and effect: if you were having health problems in your life, then wouldn’t that be the natural time to turn to the angels for help? Of course so many of the devotees didn’t seem to be well; it was why they’d needed the angels in the first place. Jonah felt a rush of relief at this theory, but it was short-lived: delving further into the records, he saw that many of the devotees had been just fine when they arrived. It was only after they’d been at the cathedral for a while that things took a turn for the worse.

Pulling up the Church home page, Jonah gazed at the photo of the half angel, Willow, with her long blond hair and elfin face. And for the first time, he wondered exactly what sort of danger she constituted to the angels.

It was late afternoon. Raziel had disappeared to his living quarters; Jonah was alone in his office. He sat looking at his phone. It would be a simple enough call to make, and surely once he’d done so, these terrible doubts would go away. Suddenly he felt that he’d give anything to return to the time when he’d had no reservations at all.

Flipping through his Filofax, he found the number he needed and dialed. It was after business hours in New York, but he knew someone would pick up in the residents’ quarters.

“Hello  . . .  Church of Angels Schenectady,” said a man’s voice.

Jonah sat up. “Yes, hi — this is Jonah Fisk, from the main office, in Denver. Could I speak to Beth Hartley?”

“Beth? I think she’s still on cleaning duty.”

“Would you mind getting her, please? It’s important.”

Jonah sat tensely in his chair as he waited. His office was very still, very quiet. The small painting of the angel hung across from him, softly illuminated by a dimmed light. He took in the fluid lines of the angel’s wings, its gentle, loving face. Its very beauty seemed to taunt his suspicions, tingeing him with guilt.

“Hello?” said a girl’s voice.

Jonah explained who he was. “I’m sorry to bother you,” he said. “I just need to ask you about Willow Fields.”

Beth sounded cautious. “What about her?”

Jonah cleared his throat. “Well  . . .  what happened, exactly?” Beth went silent. Hating himself, he added, “Please, I need to know. It’s important — the angels have asked. Was she a friend of yours before all this happened?”

“No!” said Beth, her voice startled. “We — we were mostly in different classes; she was a junior. She was always pretty strange, but seemed nice enough. And she was supposed to be psychic, so  . . .  I went to her for a reading.”

Jonah sat without moving as Beth described the encounter, finishing with: “She saw my angel; she knew exactly what had been happening. But she — she told me horrible things. I mean, really horrible things.” He could hear tension running through the girl’s tone, like a thin steel wire.

“Can you tell me what?” asked Jonah. He reached for a pencil on his desk and fiddled with it nervously, tapping it against a yellow legal pad.

“I don’t really like talking about it,” said Beth. “But if the angels have asked  . . . ” She took a deep breath. “She — she said that my angel wasn’t good. That he was  . . .  killing me and that I should get away from him. She got really insistent about it, in fact. She said that if I joined the Church, I would keep getting sicker and sicker.”

Jonah cleared his throat, his thoughts whirling. “I see. And  . . .  you haven’t, of course.”

“No, of course not!” said Beth. “I mean — yeah, I’m pretty tired sometimes, and my muscles ache, but I think I might just have the flu or something. I’m fine. I couldn’t be happier. Do you know if she’s been found yet?”

“No, not yet,” said Jonah.

“Oh,” said Beth. “I was hoping —” She sighed. “I just really hate the thought that she’s out there and that she might hurt the angels.”

“We’ll get her soon,” said Jonah distantly. “Thanks for your help, Beth. The angels be with you.”

After he hung up, he sat at his desk for a long time, looking at Willow’s smiling photo and trying to take in what he had just found out. Willow had thought that Paschar was a danger; she’d tried to stop Beth from joining the Church because she was worried about what it might do to her. Far from being an evil threat, it sounded as if Willow had actually been concerned about Beth and trying to help her.

And now the angels wanted her dead.

Jonah stared blindly at the screen, hating the thoughts that were icing through his mind. The angels had saved him. They had
saved
him; there was no doubt at all about that. Yet he was starting to wonder if maybe he was the exception.

Who could tell him what was really happening? Who could he go to for answers?

A thought came to him; he stiffened. Slowly, he clicked his mouse a few times and pulled up an e-mail on his screen. Since the assassin’s disappearance, Jonah himself was no longer responsible for dealing with the problem of the traitor angels — but when information came to Raziel by e-mail, he was still often copied in on it. Now he sat gazing at the three-line e-mail with its brief contact details, his heart thudding. The very idea was repugnant: to actually
talk
to one of them? Yet if he really wanted answers, this might be the only place he could find them.

I can’t,
thought Jonah, clutching his temples.
I’m just getting it all wrong. I’ve got to believe in them. What else do I have?

But there were Raziel’s laughing words. The woman slumped against the wall, her face drained. And the smiling girl on the website, who had tried to warn someone that an angel was hurting her.

It felt as if the whole world was ringing in his ears.

Jonah reached for his pencil and the legal pad. His hands shaking slightly, he glanced back at the e-mail and wrote down a phone number.

The camp lay in the southern part of the state, twenty miles out in the desert: a hard, scrubby land with bare, flat-topped mountains rising up from the horizon. There were no signs or roads, but Alex knew the way like he knew his own face in the mirror — though he’d never imagined making the drive in a boatlike Chevy that belonged back in the seventies with sideburns and bell-bottom jeans. He kept the speed low as the car moved slowly over the rough ground, watching the temperature gauge and praying that the radiator wouldn’t overheat. It already felt like it was nearing a hundred outside. And, just to make things even more fun, the car seemed to be out of Freon now. Even with the windows rolled down, it was stifling.

The tension from when he’d picked the glass out of Willow’s hair had faded with the morning, and he and Willow talked easily on the journey. Her slim arms were glowing with a faint sheen of sweat as she sat with her bare feet propped up onto the dashboard. “I wish I had a pair of shorts,” she said, fanning herself.

“We can probably get you some at the camp,” said Alex. “Someone should have something you can wear.”

Her green eyes looked thoughtful. “Are there female AKs?”

Alex nodded. “Sure, some really good ones. In fact, women tend to take to the chakra work better than men.” He went silent as they came to a dried-out riverbed, concentrating as he guided them over the rocky ground. A lizard sat on a nearby boulder, observing them with a contemptuous stare.
Do you really think that thing’s going to make it? Good luck, sucker. Hope you enjoy being buzzard meat
. Christ, all they needed was to break an axle out here. Not even Willow could fix that.

The Chevy groaned as it struggled up the riverbank, and Alex winced, wondering if they were going to have to walk the rest of the way. Then, with a sudden straining heave, the car made it up and over. He let out a breath.

Willow pulled her long hair off her neck and knotted it back in a bun. She cleared her throat as she finished. “You know, I’m sort of nervous about this.”

“What? Going to the camp?”

She nodded, tapping her hand against the open window. “With all the Angel Killers there, when I’m  . . .  what I am. They’re not exactly going to be my new best friends, are they?” Her voice sounded tense.

Stupidly, this hadn’t even occurred to him. He thought about it as he steered them around a series of ruts. “I guess some of them might be pretty taken aback at first,” he said. As he had been; he didn’t say this, but he knew they were both thinking it. “But, Willow, it’s not like you’re on the angels’ side — they want you dead; they think you can destroy them. That’s what everyone will be interested in, not what you are.”

She grimaced. “I hope so.”

The urge to touch her was overwhelming. Alex gave into it, resting his fingers fleetingly on her arm. “Hey, don’t worry. It’ll be OK.”

Willow’s face relaxed a fraction. She shot him a small smile. “All right. Thanks.”

They drove in silence for a while as the Chevy wheezed and moaned across the desert. Spiky yucca plants dotted the dry soil, and lizards scuttled out of their way. Finally, Alex saw the camp’s chain-link fence come into view, wavering with heat lines in the distance. “Guess what. I think we made it,” he said.

Willow sat up straight. “Is that it?”

“That’s it.” Viewing the camp through her eyes, he saw a cluster of low white buildings in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a chain-link fence with razor-edged wire curling at its top. There were no trees, no ornamentation of any kind. It was sparse and functional, completely featureless.

It was the only home he’d ever really known.

Willow pulled her shoes on, not taking her eyes off the camp as they neared it. “It looks just like what I saw.” She gave him an uncertain glance. “So, how many people will be there? Do you know?”

He shook his head. “No idea. The most there ever were when I lived here was thirty-seven.”

“That’s all?”

Alex shrugged. “It varied,” he said. Varied, depending on who had gotten killed that week and on whether his father had managed to recruit anyone new. They had gotten a lot of crazies out there — people who couldn’t handle the energy work and ended up drifting around in a dreamy haze, or psychos who just wanted to shoot up everything in sight. The core number of AKs that you could actually count on had been more like twelve.

As they neared the gates, he slowed the Chevy almost to a stop and untwisted the wires under its steering wheel. Obediently, the car died.

He stepped out into the baking sun, shading his eyes as he gazed around the camp. Apprehension crawled across his neck. It was much too quiet; there wasn’t a single other vehicle in sight. On the gate in front of them, the sign that said
PRIVATE PROPERTY, KEEP OUT AT RISK OF PHYSICAL HARM
was hanging sideways, dangling loosely from one screw.

On the other side of the car, Willow had gotten out, too, staring in at the buildings beyond the fence. She looked quickly at him, not saying anything.

Alex had a very bad feeling about this. Walking up to the gate, he saw that the lock that had always hung there was missing; there was only a latch in its place. He lifted it, and the gate pushed open easily at his touch. Inside, the building that they’d used as general storage stood with its metal door open, obviously vacant. The other buildings looked similarly abandoned. Jesus, it was a ghost town in there.

Willow moved to his side, hugging her arms. “So what does this mean?”

“It means I’m an idiot,” said Alex. He slapped his hand against the chain-link fence; it trembled and rattled. “
Shit.
The CIA must have moved the whole operation after they took over. The training camp could be anywhere now.”

Willow bit her lip. “Oh.” She looked back at the buildings. “Do you think Cully is definitely where the camp is?”

“I don’t know. I just assumed he’d be training new AKs, but  . . . ” Alex pushed harshly at the
PRIVATE PROPERTY
sign, so that it swung on its remaining screw. “I don’t even know how to get hold of him. None of us have any of the other’s cell phone numbers anymore.”

Willow looked deep in thought. “Well — what if he’s
not
training new AKs?” she suggested finally. “Where would he be, then? Maybe we could start with that, and see if we can track him down.”

Her reasonable tone calmed him, made it easier to think. “Yeah, maybe  . . .  We could try Albuquerque, I guess. I know most of his old hangouts. If he’s not with the AKs, he’s probably there somewhere.”