Sometimes you needed it—the touch, the comfort. Just another living creature who cared for you. Sometimes you got it.
Sometimes you didn’t.
I woke up with a crick in my neck and my gun under the pillow I’d brought from downstairs the night before. Leo was still gone. I knew it the second I opened my eyes. His family trouble must’ve been more than he’d expected. Or they’d lured him into an anger management intervention he hadn’t needed for a long time now. Now there was a mental picture. Leo in a circle of relatives all trying to turn him from wolf to lamb. He’d never be a lamb, but he was a good wolf now . . . or far less likely to bite anyway. Although getting his family to believe that wouldn’t be easy. They’d be trying to put the more mellow carnivore in a pink rhinestone collar. Poor Leo.
I rolled up and off the couch, stretched, and looked down at the rumpled pajamas. Not silk, my standby favorite, but a present from Griffin and Zeke from last Christmas—thin cotton footy pajamas covered with nursery rhyme figures. For the Mother Goose in me, they’d said, as I was always trying to take care of them. I couldn’t deny they were comfortable. I also couldn’t deny that when I walked out into the bar, wild halo of bed hair, cotton jammies and all, I might not have looked my best. Stunning was definitely out the window.
Not that the angel sitting at the bar seemed to care. He, on the other hand, was immaculate in human form. They always were, the few I’d seen, just like the demons. This one had straight silver hair to his shoulders. The gleam was a stark contrast to his younger face. His eyes were the same pale silver and empty. Cool and disinterested. If he had a single emotion in him, I’d let him have for free that glass of red wine he was drinking.
“If you’re here looking for a virgin, I can’t help you.” I put the gun under the counter and rooted around in one cabinet for a breakfast bar. It didn’t look like I was going to have time for much else today.
He ran a smoothing hand down the light gray suit and ignored my humor or blasphemy, depending on your point of view. “Eden House Las Vegas is no more.”
I opened the wrapper and took a bite of chocolate and granola. It didn’t sit particularly well as the memory of the dead bodies from last night hit me. “You could say that. Thanks for the help, by the way. It really turned the tide.” I took another bite, this one grimly savage. “Bastard. They were your followers and you let them die without lifting a finger to help them. Or a feather.”
He looked over his shoulder as if he expected his hidden wings were showing before turning back to face me. “They serve Heaven. Heaven does not serve them.”
“That makes it better. Thanks for that. How about they’re in a better place now. Don’t forget that one.” I discarded the granola bar. I couldn’t stomach it. Demons were bad enough, killers and liars through and through, but most angels were cold. Not all of them, but most of them. Superior egos carved from ice. They had the charisma in human form that the demons did, when they wanted, but the majority of them rarely used it. You could almost understand demons before you could an angel. I glared at him and folded my arms, equally disinterested in him as he pretended to be in me.
“If they lived lives of purity and servitude, then, yes, they are.” He sipped his ruby-colored wine. “I am Oriphiel.”
I had a feeling the surfer angel who had bothered to toss the appeal and magnetism our way in the desert had been demoted for his failure to get the fragment of the Light that I’d beaten him to. “Middle management, lower management, I could care less.” I dismissed him, although I knew that the name Oriphiel meant he was an archangel. So it was written. Somewhere. You needed a flowchart to keep it all straight.
From the looks of this guy, he considered the title of archangel and himself to be pretty hot shit—certainly not one to take orders. He gave them. “Go find Trinity,” I told him. “He belongs to you. I don’t.”
“Trinity is returning today. We will speak, but the Light is too important to be left to an unsupervised human, even one of Eden House.” He said “human” as if he were saying “pet” and, worse yet, the kind of pet that takes a year to learn how to use the cat door and another year to figure out the flap moves both ways. His pale face was as beautiful as marble and as unmoving. I wished Lenore were there to give him a lesson in pet respect, but I was here to give him the human version.
“If you think I’m going to put up with your hanging around, you’re wrong. Trinity’s putting me on a leash is more than enough.” I took the glass of wine out of his hand. “And cops drink for free. Stuck-up pigeons don’t.”
“The Light is for Above. Even one such as you couldn’t think it was better in the hands of the Abyss. Trinity says you know what it does. Can you imagine what will happen to the earth if we fail to obtain it? You will be at their mercy.”
“From what I could tell last night, we already are. I think it’s your feathered asses you’re worried about. I don’t think you give much of a damn about us, only about spiting Hell.”
“You have no idea what Heaven is, no idea what we are. You couldn’t understand if you wanted to,” he said serenely.
So smug, so damn superior. I poured the rest of the wine into the sink, but it was a struggle not to pour it over his silver head instead. “I’ve read the Bible. I think I know a thing or two.” I had read the Bible as well as several other holy books. I was familiar, you could say, with quite a few religions. Mama made sure her children were educated on a wide variety of subjects. When you traveled the world, she said, you needed to know how to stay out of trouble or how to get into it, depending on your mood.
“You’re like a worm given a molecule of a blade of grass, an electron microscope, and expected to extrapolate what the world looks like . . . its mountains and oceans, lakes and rivers, trees and plains, and all the creatures that inhabit it. The Bible”—he steepled his fingers—“that is your molecule. And you, the worm, you can’t even find the microscope.”
“Maybe that would’ve come across better with a blare of trumpets or if you’d descended from the sky surrounded by a veil of golden light, but you know what it sounded like just now?” I rested my elbows on the counter, steepled my fingers in the mirror image of his, and rested my chin on them as I faced him. “It sounded like you just screwing yourself, because there is no way in hell, or heaven for that matter, that I’ll ever help you now.”
He frowned. Finally, a ripple of emotion. “You have no choice.”
“I refer you to that molecule you were talking about on the subject of free will. So when I tell you to kiss my ass, it’s only because God was kind enough to give humans that choice.” Although truthfully the Bible, theology, and Solomon were all contradictory on the subject, I didn’t feel the need to bring that up. I was free and I knew it. I flattened my hands on the bar and was about to tell him to get the hell out of my bar when Hell decided to tell him itself.
“You really do let anyone in this place, darlin’. You need a good exterminator.” A coil of black smoke reared behind the angel to form into Eligos. He draped a black-clad arm over the shoulders covered in gray and leaned heavily, his lips touching the silver hair. “Oriphiel, pal, buddy, friend o’ mine. How’s it hanging?” His other hand dropped into the angel’s lap. “Or is it like the old days when you didn’t invest in that part when you came to Earth? Too afraid of temptation. I have to say, Ori, you were right. The temptation is so consuming, so damn good, you never would’ve made it.” He lifted his hand back up with a sigh of disappointment. “Yep, like the old days. Still not packing. You should give it a try, at least once. You are missing out like you would not believe. Let me tell you. . . .” His lips moved to Oriphiel’s ears. I couldn’t hear what he said to the angel, but I saw the results.