Battle Angel (10 page)

“You’re right, son. It was wrong of me to bring that up,” Gabriel said. “I apologize. I just want to make sure we’re clear. You may face temptations, but you must strike them down.” Gabriel turned and looked to the inscriptions underneath the depictions of ancient battles. “I don’t know how I appear to you, Jackson. But you and I are made of exactly the same thing. I can feel it. And I want to protect you, as if you were a son.”

“I understand,” Jackson said. “And thank you.”

“None of this means we don’t have compassion for the humans. I will always have compassion for them, even though they turned on us. As a young Angel, I, too, once struggled with the love of a human,” Gabriel said.

Jacks’s eyes opened in shock.
Gabriel?
In love with a
human
?

“Shocking, I know. This was before our Home had become fully hidden from humanity, when human civilization was just emerging. A young woman, more beautiful than anyone—human or Angel—I had ever seen,” Gabriel said. “She was enchanting. And she enchanted me. I knew there was no way it could work, that we could never really be together. But I trusted her anyway. And in the end, she let me down.”

Gabriel’s eyes came back into focus as he left behind memories of his ancient love and returned to the present.

“Even though they are simply humans, Jackson, they are dangerous. Don’t ever let them have you forget that.”

They’d circled back to the main atrium in front of the inner Council chambers. Gabriel stopped and looked right at Jackson.

“Jackson, you know how much I have enjoyed getting to know you,” he said.

“I’m humbled to hear you say that,” Jacks said.

“But there’s another reason I asked you to come see me today, in private,” Gabriel said. “I’ve already discussed this with Archangel Godspeed, and he believes you might be ready.”

“Sir?”

“Even here, deep in the sanctuary, there are Angels I cannot trust,” Gabriel said. “Those who would work against us, for whatever reasons they foolishly believe.”

“I . . . have heard some rumors.”

“Those rumors are, perhaps, sadly true. Not even the NAS is clean. I need someone I can trust, someone who’ll remain close to me, to help me find the rotten apples in the ranks. I know your mettle and your convictions, Jackson, which is why I’m asking for your help. These are trying times, and we need to fish out the traitors together. When I do call upon you, I will be entrusting you with the most important tasks.” Gabriel looked at Jackson. “If you’ll accept, naturally.”

“Of course I will, sir,” Jacks said without hesitation. He immediately thought of how having some kind of higher duty here could help him move on and get over all the pain he’d endured these past few days. As he moved on, he could help Gabriel and the Angels become stronger.

“It makes me happy to hear it, Jackson,” Gabriel said, smiling. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for the afternoon session with the Council.”

With a short word of goodbye, Gabriel was escorted by an assistant into the inner Council chambers.

Jacks’s mind was swimming as he was led back to the sanctuary by another Council assistant. Maybe Jacks really was being groomed by Gabriel, and all that talk amounted to more than just rumors. Gabriel was bringing him in as a confidante. For Jacks to go from an injured, washed-up Guardian to working as a personal aide to the True Immortal responsible for bringing the Angels into the modern age . . .

He was so caught in this tumble of thoughts that he almost didn’t feel his phone vibrating in his pocket.

He had a text message.

And it was from Maddy.

“Hey.”

J
ust like every other establishment in town, the old dive bar on the far side of Angel Boulevard had been closed for the four days the curfews and checkpoints had been in place. The owner, who doubled as the bartender, had ignored the evacuation warning and was now trapped in Angel City with the rest of the civilians. But where would he have gone, anyway? Angel City was his home, and this bar was his life.

Tonight, just as he’d done the previous four nights, he crept down to the bar, which was conveniently located below his apartment, to check in and make sure everything was safe and sound. He opened the door as slowly and quietly as possible, looked in on the dark and empty space, and sighed. Closed again. He wished the demons would just come in and get it over with.

Well, almost closed.

The bar was officially closed to the public, but he did have a few especially loyal customers who had permission to call him at home and request a nightcap at their favorite dive. Two such customers were Detective Sylvester and a mysterious, beautiful older woman who gave the bartender an Angel vibe, but he couldn’t be totally sure she was Immortal. He knew better than to ask too many questions. But they were allowed in whenever they felt like it—Detective Sylvester had really helped him out during the vice squad crackdowns of ’94, so the bartender owed him, and was a man of his word.

His special customers were in tonight, and they’d brought along a short, stout man in a snazzy suit who looked strangely familiar. The windows had been blacked out to prevent anyone from seeing any activity, and inside a single candle burned atop a table in the back.

The bartender wiped the layer of dust off the tabletop and nodded to the group.

“Whiskey rocks, Jim,” Sylvester said.

“I’ll have the same,” Susan Archson said.

“Just a Seven-UP for me,” said the third man. “And go easy on the fizz—I gotta drive back.” Sylvester was glad to see that even in this dark hour Louis Kreuz still had his sense of humor. He was a remarkable Angel who had held the Guardian training program together for nearly a century through sheer force of will and a stand-up personality. His style was old school—he hailed from Central Europe and had been around since the Golden Age of Angel City—but it was still more than effective. Sylvester saw him as an essential part of Angel culture, and a colorful symbol of the Immortals’ past and present in Angel City.

And he was also the resistance’s mole working inside the sanctuary. The Thorn.

Kreuz liked the code name. It tickled his particular sense of humor.

The fact that Louis was working with Sylvester and Susan, that he’d been instrumental to the resistance’s founding, was monumental. But it also made Angel life incredibly dangerous for him. Every day he stayed in the lion’s den that was the sanctuary was another day he could be found out, which is why he took every precaution possible. He used only backup burner phones with untraceable SIM cards, so he could send coded texts to Susan and Sylvester for them to decode on the other end. He had a special “dead-drop” system, where he would leave documents for an unknown agent to pick up and deliver to the resistance. And if all else failed, his assistant, also a resistance member, had a surefire contingency plan should anyone ever come looking for him in the middle of those nights when he had to steal away from the sanctuary to attend a clandestine meeting.

“Any problem getting out tonight?” Sylvester asked.

“Nope, not a one. The boys have the system down pretty good,” Louis said. He looked at David and Susan. “All right. Let’s get started. You first.”

“We’ve established lines of communications with Linden and the top officials of the Global Angel Commission,” Archangel Archson said.

“Good. Don’t talk to anyone even remotely associated with Angel City. Get as close to Linden as you can,” Louis said. “I don’t even know if I trust all his Cabinet members. If Gabriel has infiltrated any part of the GAC, he’s not letting on one bit. At least not to me.”

“What about David’s fear that the demons have somehow evolved?” Susan asked. “Some of the information we got from the field shows sightings of demons that are larger, more advanced than any of the Dark Angels the Immortals faced in ancient times. And they were so methodical, so . . . deliberate and organized. Are the Angels saying anything about that?”

“Are you talking about some kind of . . . super demon?” Kreuz asked.

“If only,” Sylvester said darkly. “I have a theory. Some
thing
is controlling them. A leader. They’re sending out scouts, finding our weaknesses. Wearing down the human psyche. They’re making sure that Angel City will be that much easier to conquer. Normal demons wouldn’t do that on their own. No. There is a leader among the Dark Ones. If we can find it . . . we could end this. We’ve just got to be one step ahead of them.
We
need to find
its
patterns,
its
weaknesses. That’s our key to finding the leader, and the leader is our key to defeating these demons. We cut the head off the leader, we cut the head off the entire army.”

“So . . . you’re saying we wouldn’t like to meet this head demon in a dark alley,” Louis mused. “As far as head demon, or super demons, if the NAS experts monitoring the demons know anything about it, they ain’t saying. Seems like they mostly just want to lie low, keep the sanctuary in one piece, and dodge any cross fire.”

“It seems like just yesterday I was tracking that lone demon Angel killer . . . ,” Sylvester said. “Now we’ve got an entire army to hunt.”

“Look on the bright side,” Louis said. “At least property prices are finally going to go down. Even if it is going to be a hell of a lot hotter with all these demons around.” He couldn’t help laughing at his own joke—classic Kreuz, Sylvester thought.

“If David’s right about the head demon, we’re going to need all the support and Immortal firepower we can get to root it out. Before it’s too late,” Susan said. “You’ve got to help us get to the Angels, Louis.”

“Something is definitely going on with the NAS and the Council,” said Louis. “They’re getting nervous. Maybe they know the resistance is growing. Gabriel has tapped the Godspeed kid to be his boy.”

“Jackson?” Sylvester said.

Louis nodded. “I don’t know how much Godspeed Junior knows. But our other spies tell me he’s spending a lot of time over in the chambers and with Gabriel in his little solarium. I know they ain’t just playing checkers.”

“We just need you and the others to stay in place,” Susan said. “And for everyone’s sake, be safe, Louis.”

“Don’t worry. I ain’t going nowhere. We’re too close,” he said. “And from what I understand, you can’t get a good steak or a decent Cuban up here in Angel City anymore, anyway.” He chuckled, gnawing on the tip of his unlit cigar, imported directly—and illegally—from Havana. “What about Maddy?” Louis asked. He’d always taken a particular interest in her, and, truth be told, he’d had a soft spot for all the Godrights since Sylvester could remember.

“Apparently she’s spoken with Linden. We don’t know details yet. We’re waiting to talk to the big man himself.”

Kreuz drained his 7UP and set the glass down on the table.

“I don’t like it,” he said. “I’ve got a bad feeling. There’re too many loose ends. We’re running out of time. It’s going to be too little, too late.”

“Maybe. But we’re not in a position yet to strike,” Susan said. “We just need a little more time.”

“I hope we got it,” Kreuz said.

“I suppose we’ll find out,” Sylvester said. “We just need to get to the head demon. We’ve got to make it happen, any way we can.”

Susan’s handbag started ringing. She plucked out her phone and looked at the caller ID. “One of Linden’s people. Excuse me, gentlemen,” she said, standing up to take the call at the other end of the bar.

The bartender, who had been busying himself by the bar, purposefully out of earshot, saw that the meeting was winding down. Their glasses had been drained. Kreuz was stretching. He went over to pick up the empties and wipe down the table.

“Just put it on my tab,” David said.

“The Seven-UP’s on the house,” the bartender said.

Kreuz popped a final handful of peanuts into his mouth from the battered plastic bowl in front of him. “Funny, they got lobster in the sanctuary. But you can’t find no peanuts. Talk about a lack of planning.”

Sylvester felt Kreuz’s eyes on his shaky hands as he handed the bartender his empty glass.

“You all right, David?” Kreuz asked.

Louis, of course, knew all about what had happened to Sylvester after he lost his wings and was disbarred from the Angels. He knew he was a first-rate ACPD policeman, but that he’d grown a reputation for having a bad case of nerves, which was why he had been quietly relegated to desk work for years. It wasn’t until the famous Angel serial killer case that he’d had the chance to prove himself a hero in more ways than one.

“Of course,” Sylvester said. “I’m just a little short on sleep, is all.” He tried to smile but couldn’t manage to look Louis directly in the eyes. Sylvester’s daily fear was that his nerves would come back and overtake him. He dreaded that black overpowering sense of anxiety. What was going on now—the resistance, the war—was too important. He couldn’t afford not to be at the top of his game.

“You know you can talk to me . . . whenever you need to,” Louis said. Like all the Guardians, Sylvester had gone through Angel training under Kreuz’s watch. He had been a brilliant Guardian student—just as brilliant as Susan, who eventually became an Archangel. Everyone knew that Louis really cared about his “kids,” which he liked to think of them as.

“Sometimes I still think of it,” Sylvester admitted.

“The child? That was a long time ago, David.”

“You know I’ve never been able to let it go,” Sylvester said.

“We’re going to need you here with us, David,” Kreuz said. “The Angels. You’re one of us, and we’re going to need leaders after this is all over. And you’re proving yourself to be a born leader.”

Sylvester opened his mouth to object, but Louis cut him off.

“Besides, there’s more than one reason to move on from that,” Kreuz said. “If not for your sake, then for somebody else’s.” He looked over at Susan, who was speaking quietly into her phone in the corner.

“What do you mean?” Sylvester asked, following his gaze.

“I’ve seen the way she looks at you,” Louis said.

Sylvester was caught off guard, turning red. Susan was a beautiful, talented Archangel, and he was just a washed-up has-been Angel, a police detective, somebody trying to do a little good to make up for the wrong he still felt he had done. But still, he took a moment to think back to the way he’d felt when Susan reached out for his arm back in the office. . . .

“You’re imagining things, Louis,” he said.

“Some detective! Ha!” Louis smiled. “Well, time I got home before the sanctuary sends out a search party. That would be mighty uncomfortable for me. See you in a while, Sylvester. And tell Susan I said ‘so long.’”

“Will do, Louis,” said Sylvester. “And remember: take care of yourself.”