He shook his head. "Not without me. I'm their supplier. I work at Home Depot."
I again found myself with time to kill in Vancouver. It was a beautiful day, and the temperature was unseasonably warm for April. So, I went and walked along the waterfront. The water seemed bluer than our own Puget Sound back in Seattle, but maybe that was just because the weather tended to be sunnier here. I wandered through Stanley Park afterward and then finally meandered back to my hotel. As I did, I again passed one of the T-shirt shops. They'd changed their display and now showed a shirt with a U.S. map on it that read: Dear Canada, Please Invade .
Back in my room, I booted up my laptop to check my e-mail. There were a few from the bookstore's mailing list that I ignored, as well as the usual spam. Along with those messages, I had one from greygoose. com's mailing list, a picture of a cat with some nonsensical caption that Cody had forwarded me, and a letter from Maddie.
It was a mass e-mail she'd sent out this morning. It read: Hey, guys! I decided to start a blog. Check it out. A link followed. Even though every instinct told me not to, I clicked it.
Should have listened to those instincts.
Pictures of her and Seth bombarded me. They'd gone to the Seattle Aquarium last night and taken assorted photos posing by puffins, squids, and other sea creatures. Worse, Seth's nieces were with them. That nearly killed me. Seth had five adorable blond nieces, ranging from four to fourteen. I loved them to pieces, and breaking up with him had been like breaking up with them too. The girls all looked reasonably happy, and I wondered if they even remembered me. Well, of course they did. It hadn't been that long. But I knew I'd keep fading from their minds until eventually, I was just some vague memory of their uncle's ex.
I shut down the laptop and decided to head down to the hotel's bar.
It wasn't quite dinnertime, so the place was fairly deserted. I took a seat at the bar near the television and promptly made friends with the bartender. Three gimlets later, I'd also made friends with an older couple visiting from San Francisco and some businessmen in town from Winnipeg. We were laughing about a recent movie when the TV suddenly changed from a curling match to static. The bartender pushed buttons on the remote ineffectually.
"What's going on?" he demanded.
A few moments later, the picture returned, but this time it was on a different channel, one showing a local news program. My smile faded, and my stomach sank.
"No," I breathed.
The camera crew was reporting from Queen Elizabeth Park, another gorgeous area in the city that I'd briefly considered going to after Stanley Park. I wondered if I might have seen this atrocity and been able to stop it if I had visited.
The Army of Darkness had staged a demonstration there late that afternoon. I counted about ten of them, so they must have recruited some of their auxiliary members. They were clothed in robes and hoods made out of cheap black and purple velvet, but I recognized two figures that looked suspiciously like Evan and Allison. Some of them held signs with pentagrams and assorted "evil" slogans while they walked around chanting something I couldn't make out. One of them had stuck a pole in the ground with a giant rubber goat mask on top of it. The mask wasn't affixed very well and kind of hung off to the side, making it look more like a mutant goat than an emblem of Hell. The footage showed a crowd gathered around and, later, police coming to break everything up.
I quickly charged the drinks to my room and sprinted off, pulling out my cell phone as I did.
"Blake? This is Georgina."
He groaned. "I know, I know. I just found out."
"What the hell happened? They said they weren't going to do anything. You said they weren't going to do anything."
"I didn't think they would!" He sounded sincerely upset. "I was at work until about a half-hour ago. I had no idea-honest. They did it on their own. I guess a bunch of them got arrested. Evan, Joy, and Crystal made it out, though."
I sighed and canceled our plans for tonight. I had to do damage control before Cedric or one of his associates came after me-and I knew for a fact they would.
I drove over to Evan's house. He answered the door, still wearing the robe but not the hood. His face was radiant and excited. "Georgina! Did you see the news? Did you see what we did?"
"Yes!" I pushed him back inside, closing the door behind me before any of the neighbors could see him. "What happened? You said you wouldn't do anything else until we met again! What happened to influencing people for the greater goo-evil?"
He finally caught on that I didn't share his excitement. "You don't think we influenced people?"
"I think you influenced some people to think you were freaks. A bunch of churches are probably going to have sermons tomorrow about staying pure and true or something like that."
Evan flounced onto his couch, speculative but still glowing with the rush of their stunt. "No, this was powerful. Its effects will be far reaching."
Far reaching enough to get me smote, no doubt. "What happened? What made you decide to do it? Had you been planning it all along?"
"No. It was just decided-a couple of hours after we met."
"But why?" I asked, frustrated.
"Because the Angel told us to."
"But you said you wouldn't!"
He looked at me like I was crazy. "But the Angel told us to. We had to obey her."
I started to argue the idiocy of that and then paused to reconsider something I hadn't given credence to before. "Are you saying the Angel actually spoke to you?"
"Yes, of course. How else would we know what she wants?"
An uneasy feeling came over me. This whole time, when they'd spoken of doing what the Angel "wanted," I'd assumed it was in the way so many religious zealots presumed they understood their deity's desires. Those who said their deity spoke to them were usually crazy.
"Does she, like, speak to you in dreams?"
"No," he said. "She appeared to me. Right here. Well, over there, actually. By the TV."
"The Angel appears to you," I said flatly. "In the flesh. Shows up and tells you what to do?"
"Of course. How else do you think we'd know?"
That uneasy feeling increased. "What does she look like?"
Evan sighed, a dreamy expression filling his features. "Oh, Georgina. She's beautiful. So beautiful. She glows-she's almost hard to look at. Her hair-it's like a cloak of gold, and her eyes…" He sighed again. "I can't describe them. Like all the colors in the rainbow."
My phone rang just then, interrupting his similes. I didn't recognize the number, but it was a Vancouver area code. "Hello?"
It was Cedric. "If you are not in my office in ten minutes," he said. "I will come and bring you here. And you won't like it."
I shoved my phone into my purse and stood up. "Evan, I've gotta run. Look, if the Angel talks to you again, can you give me a heads up next time?"
He turned hesitant. "Um, maybe."
I paused at the door. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Well, you see…Don't take this the wrong way, but she told us not to tell you. She said to keep this to the inner circle. Probably she just needs to get to know you better."
That sent my mind reeling, but Cedric's words had a greater impact at the moment. I had no time to argue against an entity that might or might not be real. "We'll talk about this later."
I sped over to the Financial District, not bothering to count the minutes for fear of what I'd find. Nothing happened to me by the time I reached Cedric's office, so I assumed I'd made it. Kristin wasn't in the reception area, but his door was open.
"Get in here," Cedric barked.
My heart pounding, I walked into his office.
His face was filled with rage, and if I'd had any thoughts that his mild manner made him seem undemonlike, that idea was immediately banished. He clenched his fists as he glared at me, and I thanked whatever luck I had that he had remained sitting and didn't throw me across the room. Meekly, I slid into my usual chair.