Angel Burn (9 page)

There were three of them. And they were all asleep.

One of the energies was a middle-aged woman. No, wait a minute — two were. They were similar. Sisters, maybe? Except that one of them was  . . .  odd. Childlike. Someone with mental problems, perhaps. But definitely both human. OK, disregard those two. The third  . . . 

He frowned. Time seemed to slow as he probed this new energy with his own. “What the hell?” he muttered.

It had the same “kick” that angel energy had, the same rush of power, but there was no trace of the cold, slimy sensation that he associated with angels. Alex slowly opened his eyes, staring at the house. Human energy fields were instantly recognizable. When you touched them with your own, you simply knew that you were touching like with like. This energy just felt  . . .  bizarre, as if someone had taken a human energy field and an angel one and mixed them together somehow.

A slight breeze stirred, and the front yard came alive: tiny kites bobbed; little wooden windmills creaked industriously. The cutseyness of it suddenly struck Alex as ominous. He tapped the steering wheel, hardly aware that he was doing so. He had to get a look at what was in there so he’d have an idea of exactly what he was dealing with. And frankly, he’d prefer to do it now, while the thing was still asleep.

Checking the two human energies again, he sensed that they were both in deep delta sleep. Out of it. Good. There was a metal box under the passenger seat; Alex pulled it out and extracted a set of lock picks. He gazed speculatively at the house, jingling the picks in his hand. The front door was out — he was too likely to be seen — but there was sure to be a back door. Should he take a chance? Picking locks had never really been his forte, not like it had been Jake’s. But this didn’t look like the sort of place where he’d be likely to encounter anything state of the art.

Making up his mind, Alex mentally scanned the houses on either side for dogs and then got out of the car, closing the door behind him. He didn’t bother trying to do it softly — if anyone was watching, trying to keep quiet would look a hell of a lot more suspicious than just acting normally. The street remained still, with only the sound of birdsong accompanying his footsteps as he strolled down the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets. The rifle was back in his car, but he could feel the pistol still tucked in his jeans under his T-shirt, there and ready if he needed it.

He turned into the house’s driveway. The concrete had spidery cracks running across it and weeds growing here and there. He edged past the two cars, then continued around the house to the backyard, creaking open the gate of the chain-link fence. No lock; that boded well. Closing the gate behind him, he took in at a glance the overgrown grass and faded wooden lawn furniture, the pots of greenery on the patio.

To his relief, the neighbors’ view was blocked on either side by a dense row of tall arborvitae trees. Alex eased the back screen door open. It had a few holes in it, he noticed — just the thing to keep the flies out. He examined the inner lock and smiled. He was in luck; it was a cheap one. Selecting a rake pick, he inserted it into the keyhole and slid it rapidly back and forth. Almost immediately, there was a faint click as the pins fell obediently into place. Success.

Alex slipped inside, tucking the lock picks back into his pocket. Jake had always sneered at him for using the rake; it took a lot less skill than some of the other picks and was useless against a good security lock. But if it got the job done, why argue?

Glancing around, he saw that he was standing in a pale-blue kitchen with white cabinets. An unwashed pot sat on the stove; there was a meal’s worth of dirty dishes beside the sink. He moved through the kitchen and pushed gently at a partially open door. It swung obediently wider; he stepped through and found himself in a dining room, where he stared in disbelief at the large velvet painting of a sad clown that hung on the wall. Whatever this creature was, it had seriously bad taste. Precarious-looking heaps of clutter filled the room’s corners — stacks of papers, magazines, cardboard boxes. A white lace tablecloth covered the dining table, with a messy pile of mail scattered across one end. Alex picked up the top envelope. A bill from the Pawtucket Water Department, addressed to Ms. Joanna Fields.

He froze as a faint snore sounded in the next room. Quietly, he placed the envelope back onto the pile and pulled out his pistol, flicking the safety off. His fingers dug in his jeans pocket for the silencer; he screwed it on in a few deft movements and eased through a pair of French doors into the living room.

A teenage girl lay asleep on the sofa, curled under a red-and-black knitted afghan. She was on her side, with one slender arm cradling a throw cushion nestled under her head. Long, wavy blond hair spread across her back and shoulders like a cape. Even though she was sleeping, Alex could see how pretty she was, with her delicate, almost elfin features. He stood in the doorway, watching the soft rise and fall of her chest. When he was certain that she wasn’t going to wake up, he closed his eyes and began shifting his consciousness up through his chakras.

As his focus rose above his crown chakra, he breathed in sharply. The human-angel energy was much stronger here, like a tide threatening to sweep him off his feet. This was it, all right; this girl was what he’d sensed from outside. But what was she? Keeping his focus in the ethereal plane, Alex opened his eyes  . . .  and saw the radiant form of an angel hovering above the girl’s sleeping figure.

Instantly, his gun was at the ready. But even as his finger started to pull the trigger, his mind was balking at what he was seeing. This wasn’t right; there was something wrong, something missing —

As he realized what it was, his eyes widened. He stepped around the coffee table, keeping his gun trained on the creature before him. It floated peacefully with its wings folded behind its back, its head bowed slightly, as if in sleep. It wasn’t his imagination: the angel didn’t seem aware of him.

But more than that, it had no halo.

Alex shook his head blankly. He had to be seeing things. The angel’s face was lovely, serene, a magnified version of the girl’s own. Yet where there should be a halo framing its head, there was simply  . . .  nothing. An angel’s halo was its heart; without one, it couldn’t survive. His eyes flicked again to the sleeping girl. The image was obviously a part of her; the two were linked somehow. So what did
that
mean, when angels couldn’t maintain their human form and their ethereal one at the same time?

Alex stared at the girl, troubled. Distantly, he realized that his gaze was lingering on her face, taking in the faint gold of her eyebrows; her eyelashes against her smooth cheeks. His head snapped up as he heard a car pull into the drive. On the sofa, the girl stirred, snuggling deeper into her pillow. Alex moved to the window. Parting the curtains the barest inch, he watched an old yellow Corvette park behind the Toyota. The engine fell silent, and a thin girl with brown hair and lots of eye shadow got out. Alex quickly scanned her. She was wholly human.

As she headed toward the front door, he let the curtain fall again and slipped into the dining room, pressing himself against the wall to one side of the French doors. The door knocker rapped softly — two short, hesitant knocks. “Willow!” called the girl’s voice in an undertone. It sounded like she was looking up toward the bedroom windows. “Hello, good morning. . . . Are you awake yet?”

There was a groan from the other room as the girl started to wake up. Craning his neck slightly, Alex watched in amazement as the shining angel image wavered and began to fade.

“Willow!” hissed the girl on the front porch, knocking again. “Open the door. I forgot my phone!”

The girl — Willow? — lifted her tousled head and peered blearily toward the front door. Yawning, she threw the afghan off, then stood up and headed for the dining room. Alex drew back against the wall, his heart quickening. She shuffled through without seeing him. As she went into the hallway, he saw that she was wearing pink pajama bottoms and a light-gray T-shirt. She was petite, only five three or so, but obviously close to his own age — slim, with a small, perfect figure.

There was no longer any sign of the angel. No indication at all that there was anything nonhuman about the girl.

He heard the front door open. “Nina, what are you doing here?” the girl said groggily. “It’s hardly even light out.”

Nina’s voice sounded strained. “I know, but I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about Beth — all that stuff you told me yesterday.”

There was a pause, and then he heard Willow sigh. “I didn’t get much sleep either; I must have fallen asleep in front of the TV. Look, wait here. I’ll go get us some coffee.”

“Wait here?” Nina sounded surprised. “Aren’t I allowed in the house anymore?”

“Not at ungodly o’clock, you’re not,” said Willow shortly. “I don’t want to wake up Mom and Aunt Jo, OK? We’ll sit on the front porch.”

Alex pressed against the wall again as she came back indoors. Thankfully, she didn’t turn on the dining-room light as she passed through again on her way to the kitchen, and he remained hidden in the half shadows. There was the sound of a cabinet opening and of running water. Alex took a silent step closer to the kitchen door and watched unseen as Willow spooned instant coffee into a pair of mugs. With another yawn, she scraped her hair off her face and stretched. She looked so entirely human, so drowsy and sleep-rumpled.

For a moment, Alex just gazed at her, taking in her long tumble of hair, her wide green eyes and pixieish chin. Fleetingly, he imagined her eyes meeting his, wondering what she’d look like if she smiled.

Irritated with himself — why the hell was he even thinking this? — he shook the idea away and checked out Willow’s aura. Angelic silver, with soft lavender lights shifting through it: again, like a mix of angel and human. But unlike an angel’s aura, there was no bluish tint to its edge, no indication of when she had last fed. In fact, it looked as if she didn’t need to feed at all, at least not in the same way angels did. Drawing his energy back to his heart chakra, Alex regarded the girl in confusion. She was angelic  . . .  and yet she wasn’t.

A framed photo on a dusty bookcase caught his attention; he moved closer and picked it up silently. A small girl with long blond hair was standing under a tree, her face tilted up in delight as its feathery leaves brushed across her face, framing it.

A willow tree. Willow.

Alex stared down at the small photo. If he had needed further confirmation that this girl was something bizarre, then this was it. An angel’s human form was always that of an adult — they didn’t have childhoods; they didn’t breed. If Willow had been a child, then she wasn’t an angel of any type he’d ever encountered before.

So what was she?

He ducked into the shadows again as Willow suddenly returned to the dining room and plucked a purple sweater off one of the piles. She pulled it over her head as she walked back into the kitchen, then smoothed her long hair with both hands and tied it into a loose knot at the nape of her neck.

God, she’s beautiful.
The unbidden thought whispered through his mind as Willow grabbed the mugs of coffee and headed back outside. “Here you go, Nescafé’s finest,” he heard her say as she went out onto the porch. The front door closed.

Alex shoved the photo almost harshly into his jacket pocket. Of course she was beautiful, he reminded himself — she was part angel somehow. He headed quickly through the kitchen and then out the back door, easing it shut behind him. In seconds, he’d jogged across the crumbling patio and shouldered his way through a pair of tall, winter-smelling arborvitaes. The chain-link fence felt cool as he grasped it; he scaled it swiftly and dropped into a neighbor’s backyard. From there, he climbed into the next. A few minutes later, he was on the street again, walking casually toward his car. Glancing at Willow’s house, he could see the two girls talking, their heads bent in earnest conversation.

No. He shook his head as he slid behind the steering wheel and started the engine. Not two girls —
one
girl and one something that he didn’t understand at all.

When the CIA had taken control of Project Angel after the Invasion almost two years earlier, a lot of things had changed. One of the main ones was that each Angel Killer now worked alone, with no contact from the others. Alex didn’t even know where the rest of the AKs were; he hadn’t been in touch with them for over twenty months. Anonymous texts arrived on his cell phone from unknown angel spotters; there were no names involved, no way for him to link the information he received to an actual person. Though his longing for the old days — the camaraderie, going on the hunt together, even the boring, endless days at the camp in the desert — was like an ache inside of him, he knew that the secrecy was necessary. This was war, even if its millions of casualties were too blissed-out to realize it. If he were caught by the angels or any of their human followers, he wouldn’t be able to give them any information.

But it also meant that it was a bitch to actually get ahold of someone if you needed to.

Alex spent the next five hours in his motel room, trying the emergency number that he’d been given when the CIA took over. He’d been told — on the phone, by an unknown voice — to memorize it and then destroy it. It wasn’t to be used except in cases of untold emergency.

For a long time, no one answered. He watched ESPN as he hit redial over and over, frowning at the TV screen without taking anything in. “Come
on
, pick up the goddamn phone,” he muttered.

Finally, just before noon, there was a click and a woman’s voice came on the line. “Hello?”

Alex had been lying on the bed with his cell cradled between shoulder and ear, dully channel surfing. He dropped the remote and snatched at his phone, sitting straight up. “This is Alex,” he said.

There was a long pause. “Yes?”

“I need to talk with someone.”

“This number is only to be used —”

“This
is
an emergency,” he said, his voice tight. “Trust me.”