We. He felt a vague nostalgia for the time he’d spent on his own. “Maybe it means you’re supposed to send me back to the light.”
“Maybe you should just stay out of this.”
“Sure.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means my head hurts.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
The bed rocked as she threw herself off it. Samuel winced. “You want to hear the weird thought I had as I finished showering?”
“I guess.”
“That makes me feel more human.”
“What does?”
“The shower, I guess. It’s the thought I had: That makes me feel more human. And then…” He waved a hand in the general direction of his head. “…this. Pain.”
Diana snorted. “Got news for you, bucko. Pain is the general human condition.”
“Then send me back. I don’t think I want to be human anymore.”
“Well, that’s just too…” Her voice trailed off into thought. They couldn’t find the demon because she was the exact opposite of Samuel. The exact opposite. Throwing herself back onto the bed, she grabbed his shoulders hard enough to dimple the bare skin. “I’m an idiot!”
“Look, I know it’s unangelic of me, but I don’t really feel up to dealing with your lack of self-esteem right now.”
“What?”
“Stop shaking me!”
“Sorry.” She pulled her hands away but continued looming over him. “I’ve just solved the problem. If you don’t want to be in a human body, you don’t have to be.”
“I don’t?” Pushing back against the pillow accomplished nothing much, but he didn’t like the way her eyes were gleaming.
“No, you don’t. I helped make you. My, for lack of a better word, power signature is a part of you. That’s why I can unmake you, but it should also mean I can transform you.”
“Should?”
Ignoring him, she leaped up and spun around, arms outstretched. “You’ll still be you but different. The demon copied this body, so without it, we’ll be able to find her. It’s simple.”
“I won’t be human?”
The spinning stopped. “No.”
“But I’ll still be me.”
“Yes.”
“What will I be?”
“I don’t know. I’ll undo the human seeming and the light will rearrange. Without Lena and her father to interfere, you’ll self-define.” Suddenly serious, she sat down and pushed her hair off her forehead. “I don’t want to push you into this, Samuel, but it would solve all our problems.”
It took him a moment to figure out her expression. When he realized he was looking at hope, he couldn’t stop himself from smiling. Hope was, after all, one of the primary messages of the light. Maybe this was why he was here. “Would my head hurt?”
“Different body. No reason why it should.”
“Then let’s do it.”
Claire and Dean had opened the way for the light, but her crepe-paper snowflake hanging from the ceiling in the gym had held it together. Standing at the foot of the bed, Diana closed her eyes and reached into the possibilities until she could see Samuel lying in front of her. Slowly and carefully, she detached the parameters Lena and her father had placed around him. She took him back to what he had been in the gym, then wrapped the part that was Samuel in the possibilities and pushed him forward.
In the instant between Diana taking him back and shoving him forward again, Samuel thought he heard voices.
“So he’s off the duty roster?”
“Let’s just say he’s on an extended leave of absence.”
“Let’s just say?” The first voice snorted. “Oh, easy for you, Gabriel. You’re not the one who has to fill his post on the Perdition front.”
“Bitch, bitch, bitch.”
“Hey, there’s a war on, you know. Or maybe that’s something you guys in the band have forgotten.”
And then there was only light, and a question.
If he wasn’t an angel, and he wasn’t a human, what was he?
Diana blinked away afterimages and stared down at the towel she’d thrown over Samuel’s crotch. Whatever he’d become fit under it with room to spare. Fingers crossed, she bent down and flicked it back.
The marmalade tabby sat up and looked around.
“You’re a cat.”
“Well, duh. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that angels were like cats only with…” He cocked his head, trying to remember just what it was Ilea had said. “…you know, differences.”
Staggering back, Diana went to sit down on one of the chairs but, at some time during the proceedings, it had self-defined as a plant stand, and she hit the floor instead. It suddenly became painfully clear who Samuel had reminded her of as he’d made his reproachful way to the bathroom.
Austin.
TWELVE
SINCE DEAN HAD POLITELY but vehemently objected to her willing the truck faster, Claire let her head loll back against the headrest and closed her eyes. Extending her will toward Toronto, she slid past the permanently monitored sites, her passage noted only by the elderly Keeper at the site in Scarborough.
“Oh, sure, you can go by like a ship in the night, but you never write, you never call. A lousy birthday card would kill you? The best forty-two years of my life I give to you and you don’t even remember my birthday. You got a memory like a cantaloupe.”
“Excuse me?”
“Why? What did you do?”
Claire moved on into the possibilities a little faster. Keepers who essentially became the seal that stopped darkness from emerging out of an unclosable hole, became caricatures of their former selves. She’d narrowly missed becoming the youngest Keeper to ever hold such a position and shuddered at the sudden vision of herself at ninety-two in stretch capri pants and wedges, scarlet lips and crimson fingernails, badly dyed hair poofed out over way too much purple eye shadow—a cross between Nancy Reagan and Miss Piggy.
Didn’t happen, she reminded herself. Didn’t…
Wait.
Something was happening.
She heard voices…
“I’m warning you, Michael, don’t touch the horn.”
“Or you’ll what? Blow me?”
…then a sudden flash of light threw her back into her body. She stiffened and moaned. The Summons hit a heartbeat later.
“As much as I’m happy you two are back into it,” Austin muttered without opening his eye, “given that we’re speeding down a snowy highway with a bunch of lunatics who’ve forgotten how to drive since the last time the frozen white stuff fell, don’t you think Dean ought to keep both hands on the steering wheel?”
“I can feel the demon.”
“I thought you were calling it Floyd. Ow!” He turned his head and glared at her. “Don’t poke the cat, I’m old.”
“So Diana came through, then?” Dean asked, making a mental note to ask about this Floyd guy when the cat wasn’t around.
“I knew she would.”
Austin snorted. “You thought she was going to destroy the world as we know it, bringing upon us the Last Judgment and roller disco. Not that there’s a lot of difference,” he added.
Somewhat redundantly in Dean’s opinion. “Are we still after heading to Toronto, then?”
Claire checked the Summons. “So far.”
They drove in silence for a few moments.
“The angel’s gone, then?”
Curious about Dean’s tone, Claire turned to face him. “Yes.”
“And you can find the demon now?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And when you find the demon, you can get rid of it?”
“I’m a Keeper. Of course I can get rid of it.”
He glanced toward her and smiled suggestively. “No angel, no demon…”
“No problem.” Realizing where he was headed, she returned his smile and stroked one finger along the top of his thigh.