“Annabella?”
She opened her eyes as the wolf began a slow advance across the street. Head lowered, ears pinned back, he picked his way through the darkest fall of shadow toward her. His growl was low with menace. His eyes were wild yellow, and locked on her.
“Mom, I’m scared.” She sounded three, instead of twenty-three, but she didn’t care. She crab-crawled upward to sit on the backrest of the bench. Her blood pounded in her ears as she clutched the phone like a lifeline. Her body loosened slightly, and she knew, tired as she was, that she could run if she had to.
“I’m calling the police on the other line.”
Annabella’s eyes teared at the urgency in her mom’s voice. She shouldn’t have called home in the first place, shouldn’t have put her mom through this. The wolf crossed the midline of the road and she started to shake. A roaring sound filled her ears. This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening.
“Honey, it’s going to be okay.” Sure enough, her mom released a tirade of demands in the background. “Where is the dog now?”
“It’s…uh…” Fear choked her answer. The wolf ambled closer, his paws silent on the pavement. As he drew near, she perceived that the blackness of his coat was instead a variable absence of color. The thing lacked substance, like a nightmare, and yet his intent was palpable enough.
“Honey?” Her mom’s voice was high and harsh, frantic.
A scream built up in Annabella’s throat, gathering into a tight kernel of fear.
But the wolf stopped there, at the edge of a circular pool of streetlight. He snarled into a series of sharp barks, loud as cracking thunder, but did not cross into the halo of light. The barks hit her like blows, but she kept her seat. Didn’t run off into the dark.
The wolf satisfied himself with a slow prowl around the perimeter of the glow, his gaze fixed on her. Waiting.
If she could have wrapped the lamplight around her like a cloak, she would have. As it was, she fully intended to stay on this bench all night, until the sun rose and burned away the monster.
“Honey!”
“I’m here.”
“The dog?”
Wolf. “Mad, I think.” Her voice shook her words to pieces. “I’m not going to move. Or breathe. Maybe it will leave me alone.”
“Oh, honey.” Now her mom was crying.
“I’m sorry, Mom.” The tears in her voice matched her mother’s. The wolf finished its first threatening lap. “I should’ve taken a cab. I promise to take a cab from now on.”
Her gaze followed the animal as it started a second circuit, somewhat larger to take him farther from the street bench.
The high-pitched squeal of a bus’s brakes told her why. The bus had arrived, hissing to a stop, its interior bright as day. Salvation.
“What’s that?” her mom asked.
The bus’s door folded open. Annabella laughed as tears spilled down her cheeks, and she stepped from streetlight to safety. “The bus. I’m on the bus.”
“Oh, thank you, God,” her mom breathed into the phone. “You’ll be okay now?”
With every light on in her apartment and a good night’s sleep. “Yeah, I think so.”
She glanced out the window onto the darkened street as she took her seat, searching for signs of movement. I hope so.
Chapter Two
ANGELS. Custo couldn’t stand them in his head, picking up his thoughts and casting theirs his way.
From each one, understanding, acceptance, and a convoluted explanation of how they were related to him through such and such crap ancestral line. One big happy family. He wanted to tell them all to piss off and leave him the hell alone. With all the fluid mind-speak going on, he was certain his opinion was more than clear.
The barrage of mental dialogue intensified near the elaborately carved marble passages of the Halls of Memory, each subtle detail telling the story of the world. Would it kill them to use their mouths to speak? Their incessant nonvocal histories and orations on the meticulous ordering of the universe made him want to knock the serene expressions from their faces. Who could possibly give a damn about creation when there was a war raging on Earth?
Humanity against the wraiths. A traitor within Segue, the world’s only defense against the immortal soul-suckers.
But no amount of asking, shouting, or begging for aid would move them. Each passing moment was a moment wasted.
So Custo kept as far from the halls as possible, haunting the gate, waiting for that cold bastard Shadowman’s return. Except, as often as Death approached, Custo had yet to catch him before he was gone again. Like the angels, the dark fae hadn’t listened to his pleas when he died. And now Death was quick when delivering his souls, too quick thus far for Custo to catch and convince.
Yet there had to be a way.
Custo climbed the white stone steps of the gate’s outer wall, his fingers grazing the intricate carvings that decorated the massive boundary between the Shadowlands and Heaven. Some talented, very patient soul had rendered the ivory stone into a complex latticework interspersed with miniature carvings of animals, flora, and the faces and forms of generations upon generations of people, young and old, happy and despairing.
A growing warmth in Custo’s consciousness alerted him that his lookout on the wall was already taken. He stretched his mind to isolate the identity and intent of the individual before he turned back and went the other way. He was really not in the mood…
Oh. His heretofore unknown cousin, Luca, come to babysit him again. Could be worse.
Custo joined Luca, leaning against the stone ramparts above the rambling expanse of the Shadowlands. His vantage looked down upon the diamond white shore, beyond that, the wide gray channel, and farther still, the Shadow forest with leaves dark and changeable as nightshade. The Shadowlands’ only constant was the tempting question, What if…?
Any moment now, Death would be back. From this angle and altitude, Shadowman’s small boat would be visible. Custo’s ticket out of here.
“Go away,” Custo said.
Luca chuckled. “I thought you might want company.”
“You know I don’t.” He had to get out of here. To find a way to return to mortality and warn Adam. Beleaguered by the wraith war, Adam wouldn’t think to look for sabotage within his own ranks, even after Spencer’s betrayal. Adam was just too trusting. Without Adam, The Segue Institute would crumble, and without Segue, the wraiths would eventually dominate the world.
Luca sighed. “If you went into service, you might find the time easier to bear. You might find purpose. There is great work to be done.”
Not any work he was suited for. “I prefer solitude.”
The saving grace of Heaven, the only thing that kept Custo remotely sane, was that in spite of the overwhelming—and in his opinion, slightly obsessive—order to the place, nothing about him had really changed. At least that he could tell. He was himself, and if he wanted to wait at the outer wall, no one tried to force him to do otherwise. For that reprieve alone, he gave Luca his attention.
Luca had died in his late forties, but he appeared youthful and fit, as if twenty-five. He was casual in jeans and a white tee, where Custo wore black. Luca’s dark hair was longish and curling. Almost femme, if his black gaze weren’t so intense.
“You might find your memories less bothersome,” Luca said.