I, Angel

by JC Andrijeski

“Go outside,” she said, shooing him off like he was another servant, or maybe a pet. “Phoenix is out there. Let her deal with you for a while⏤”

  “You should know something,” Dags cut in. “Before we go any further. I sent you messages, but maybe you didn’t get them. Tig. Jason Tig. He’s dead. He died at my place. Two, maybe three hours ago.”

  Asia froze, mid-step.

  Then she turned, jaw hard, shrugging in the flowing green dress. “I know. I got your texts. And that detective called me⏤”

  “So why I am here?” Dags said. “You can’t still want to hire me?”

  He, Dags Jourdain, didn’t think this thing was over, but he had no idea why she would think that. With Tig dead, it should be “case closed” as far as Asia Jackson was concerned.

  “We got another letter,” Asia said.

  Dags frowned. “A letter? When?”

  “Tonight.”

  She gave him a bare glance before walking to her right, following the glass wall behind the bamboo partition, which only rose to about half the height of the room. The partition turned that part of the living room into a corridor.

  Dags had to assume that way led to the kitchen.

  Or at least to the housekeeper, Veronica.

  “Go outside,” Asia repeated, waving him in the direction of the firepit. “I don’t know where Karver is, but Phoenix is out there. She can answer your questions, big guy.”

  Chapter 11

  Crossed Streams

  It took Dags another minute to find the door leading to the patio.

  The wall of glass appeared unbroken at first; it wasn’t exactly obvious which part of it opened up to the outside.

  He started to wonder if Asia was screwing with him⏤or perhaps if both of them were, or all three of them, maybe, if that guy, Karver, was in on it.

  Then he walked to the left side of the living room, past the second bamboo partition, and felt a breeze.

  He followed the breeze, passing under an elaborate sculpture made of twisting pipes and colored glass globes, aiming his feet towards a different maze of bamboo screens and secondary corridors. He found himself in a narrow passage, one with a new room ahead, one with lime green, spiral-covered carpets, and a series of Art Deco couches on terraced, step-like platforms up to the second floor of the building.

  A giant glass door, over ten feet high, stood open to the sea.

  He walked through it, and was immediately hit by a gust of cold ocean air, smelling of the faintest hint of brine. Still walking like he half-expected a fight, he made his way back the direction he’d come, aiming his boots for the fire pit he’d seen, but this time on the opposite side of the glass wall.

  He smelled the chlorine of the jacuzzi before he saw it.

  He passed a set of oddly round stone sculptures, and reached the firepit.

  Just below the terrace where the fire pit burned, down a series of volcanic-stone steps, Dags’ eyes found the jacuzzi. The sunken tub, surrounded by more of those dark-colored flagstones, was accented with torches and lit from within by a dark red light.

  The red light, the torches, the fire pit, the volcanic stone, the bubbles in the water… the combined effect was to turn the jacuzzi into some kind of hell pool.

  There was a woman in it.

  Her back was to him.

  She wore short black shorts that rode up her butt, and a green bikini top.

  Resting her chin on folded hands, she gazed out at the ocean, her arms resting flat on the opposite edge of the jacuzzi, her legs and feet gently pedaling in the frothy water. Long, black hair hung down her back, mostly wet. It looked like she’d bleached and dyed parts of it, turning the black a deep red, mostly in front, where it likely framed her face when dry.

  Her body was a little too easy to stare at.

  Dags wasn’t usually a gawker, but he stared now.

  Even so, he wanted her to turn around.

  He wanted to see her face, and not only because he wondered if he’d recognize it from some billboard or another around town. For an Angeleno, he didn’t watch a lot of movies, or a lot of current television, or keep up on much of anything really, but he wasn’t blind; the whole town was covered in posters and billboards from its most famous industry.

  Dags stood there, his back to the fire pit, and willed her to turn, to look up at him.

  She didn’t. If she felt him there, looking down at her, he saw no indication.

  For his part, he didn’t speak, or even clear his throat.

  Instead, his eyes rose to the ocean, looking at what she was looking at.

  There was no moon.

  Where she was, away from the lights of the house, the stars were likely even brighter, but even with the fire pit to his back, the house lights relatively dim but directly behind him, he could see more stars than he saw in most of Los Angeles. It reminded him of being in the desert, visiting family in New Mexico where houses were few and far between, and the entire population of the state didn’t equal half the population of Los Angeles alone.

  He remembered stars like this there.

  He was still standing there, gazing out over the dark ocean, when someone behind him cleared his throat.

  Dags just about jumped out of his skin.

  That was the second damned time today.

  “You that private eye?” a male voice said.

  Dags turned, finding himself face to face with a disarmingly handsome man. The man’s dirty-blond hair was surfer-messy, but in a way that likely required a lot of time and product. His shockingly light-colored eyes, which were technically brown but almost amber in color, studied Dags’ face and body openly, a smirk-like smile hovering on his lips.

  Dags distinctly got the impression the guy was having to make an effort to sound amused.

  The guy wasn’t amused.

  The disarmingly handsome, blond, probably-actor looked at Dags like he was a feral animal someone let loose in his house. Something dangerous, something likely to root in the garbage and maybe give him rabies.

  Something he clearly saw as a threat.

  This had to be Karver.

  Dags found himself studying the other man’s aura.

  It was a difficult habit to break.

  Equally difficult to break was Dags’ tendency to form a snap judgment about whatever he found. He knew he shouldn’t do it. He also knew seeing so much about a complete stranger, without having truly interacted with them, wasn’t fair.

  Well, it didn’t feel fair, anyway.

  It felt especially unfair when Dags used it in his personal life, for personal reasons, versus when he was on the job and working. When he was working, it was different.

  Of course, he reminded himself, technically, he was working now.

  Still, something about his assessment of the actor felt more personal than not.

  Dags found himself studying the lights flickering and sparking around this guy, Karver, anyway. He only stopped when he realized he was looking for reasons to dislike him. It should have been funny, really⏤if only because it quickly became clear that Karver was doing the exact same thing with him, even if he didn’t have the advantages Dags did.

  “What’s your name?” This time, Karver made his voice openly bored. “I’m sure Asia told me, but for some reason⏤”

  “Jourdain,” Dags cut in. “Dags Jourdain.”

  “And you’re that P.I.?”

  Dags held his gaze. “Yes.”

  “Asia says they caught the guy, though, right?” Karver said.

  On the surface, his voice exuded that boredom, almost an exaggerated amount of boredom, but Dags wasn’t fooled for a second. He could see the hostility in the other man’s aura. Hell, he could hear it in his voice.

  “If by ‘caught’ you mean ‘dead,’ then yeah,” Dags said drily. “I guess he was more or less taken off the game board.”

  Dags kept his voice flat, but even he heard the edge there.

  The aggression was overt, even for him.

  Mak
ing an effort to dial it back, Dags added, “I was a little surprised Asia still wanted me to come over, to be honest.”

  “So why did you come?” Karver said, equally blunt, equally verging on hostile. “You couldn’t have told her that over the phone?”

  Dags made his face utterly expressionless.

  He considered answering, then didn’t.

  “Money?” Karver said, now pushing it with the smirk. “Are you hoping to get a tip for services rendered last night?”

  The way the actor said that last part, he might not have been talking about the fight in the alley. Or he might not have been talking about only that.

  Dags wasn’t about to ask, not when the guy so clearly wanted him to.

  “I guess nervous celebrities are easy money for guys like you,” Karver added, his voice a touch harder. “Especially young women.”

  Dags let that sit for a beat.

  Then he shrugged, looking back towards the ocean.

  “You just described half the economy of Hollywood,” he said.

  There was a silence.

  Then Karver let out a low laugh, almost like he couldn’t help himself.

  “Fair enough,” he said, the smile coming through his voice. “I bet that P.I. thing works in your favor, though. That gig probably bags you a lot of babes, am I right? Hollywood loves a good romantic hero.”

  He smiled at Dags, and that time, it was almost friendly.

  Dags wasn’t fooled. Hostility continued to seethe through the guy’s aura. Dags didn’t really question where it came from. He could think of a number of causes, none of them particularly relevant to why he was here.

  He’d known for a long time he elicited that response in certain men.

  In this case, he suspected there might be more to it than that.

  His eyes flickered back to the jacuzzi, almost involuntarily.

  The woman in the bikini and shorts must have heard them talking.

  She must have heard their voices at least, even if she couldn’t make out the words. She’d turned around from where she’d been staring out over the ocean, and now sat with her butt on the jacuzzi bench, her hands and arms floating on top of the water. She held herself totally still, almost unnaturally still as she stared up at the two of them, her eyes lit by the red light in the hot tub and the firelight from the torches on either side.

  Now she looked like Hell’s Queen.

  Hell’s Queen was watching Dags and the actor posture and circle one another like kids in a schoolyard. She was staring at them, silent, her inhuman-looking features unmoving.

  No… not the two of them.

  Dags.

  She was staring at Dags.

  He found himself looking back at her, unable to stop himself.

  He couldn’t have said how or why he got lost there.

  He wasn’t even looking at her aura.

  In fact, it hit him, only a few seconds after their gazes broke, that he couldn’t see her aura at all. It confused him, that lack of flickering and morphing colored lights. He looked for it specifically when he glanced at her next, studying her outline as surreptitiously as he could.

  She didn’t have an aura.

  There was nothing there. Nada.

  All he saw was the red glow from the hot tub’s underwater lights, and a more erratic glow from the torches as they guttered and flared in the wind.

  As for that mutual stare, it felt almost like something had passed between them.

  He didn’t know what passed between them.

  Hell, he had no idea what happened at all in those few seconds.

  Whatever it was, it felt almost like blacking out. It felt like being back in the desert, back with his friends on that damned dreamwalk. Back in that long, blank stretch of time after he ingested the contents of a plastic red cup, a cup filled with some Datura concoction Uri made for them. That same sense of unreality descended.

  Everything seemed to lose cohesion.

  In that stretch of nothingness, all he saw were her eyes. The land, sky, deck, and ocean blurred around the two of them, erased with everything else.

  It didn’t feel romantic. It more felt like he got briefly thrown out of his body.

  Like something in her completely destabilized something in him.

  A voice erupted from behind him, seemingly right in his ear.

  “Is this as far as you got?” Asia said.

  Dags jumped.

  Flinching back violently, he felt his whole body tense.

  He turned, staring at her.

  When he did, he caught Asia and Karver exchanging knowing looks. Only, on Asia that look held a good-natured humor. On Karver, it… definitely didn’t.

  Karver looked angry.

  That hostility Dags picked up on before now shot out sparks of black, red, and dark-orange, violently dancing around the purplish aura of his head. The light and the emotion behind it turned the actor’s face into a harder mask.

  Dags blinked, fighting not to react.

  He glanced back at the woman in the jacuzzi, in spite of himself.

  He was sure he must have hallucinated her lack of aura.

  Nope. He hadn’t.

  If she had one, Dags couldn’t see it.

  He answered Asia even as he continued to look for it.

  “I wasn’t sure if I should bother her,” he said, still staring at the aura-less woman in the green bikini and black short-shorts.

  Asia laughed, throwing back her head.

  Dags looked at her, puzzled, but Asia Jackson only shook her head, that knowing look even more prominent in her brown eyes.

  “I never would have pegged you as a star-fucker, Angel-guy,” she mused.

  Dags wasn’t sure how to respond to that.

  He glanced at Karver, the probably-actor.

  Karver’s mouth and jaw had hardened, and hardened more when he met Dags’ stare. His aura sparked with hotter flames around his throat and head.

  Dags didn’t need to be some sophisticated aura-reader to know the guy wanted to kick his ass. Karver-the-actor also wanted Dags gone. If this had been Karver’s house, instead of Asia’s and Phoenix’s, he likely would have found some excuse to order Dags out of it already.

  Dags didn’t really want to understand the reasons he could see and feel there, but he understood them clearly enough, anyway.

  He knew why the hostility felt so personal.

  Karver either was⏤or wanted to be⏤fucking the woman in the jacuzzi.

  The thought made Dags’ teeth grind.

  He didn’t really want to think about where his mind was going, either in relation to the woman in the jacuzzi or what just happened when they locked gazes, but he knew he disliked Karver immensely. He also knew his reasons for disliking him were irrational, and probably not that different from Karver’s reasons for disliking him.

  The thought was unnerving, but impossible to refute.

  He, Dags Jourdain, was jealous.

  He was jealous, pissed off, confused.

  He felt like someone had hit him in the head⏤hard.

  Worse, he couldn’t explain any of it, not even to himself.

  He looked back at Asia, fighting to keep his expression normal, even as he fought a scowl. He knew the scowl was mostly a reaction to his own confusion, not to mention a pounding in his chest that felt a hell of a lot like fear.

  What the hell was wrong with him?

  He wasn’t used to losing control of himself, especially around people he didn’t know. As far as he could remember, he’d never reacted like that to a stranger in his life. It wasn’t her looks. He couldn’t even lock on a mental image of what she looked like, apart from that glimpse of her ass in the short-shorts and her legs kicking lazily in the jacuzzi bubbles.

  Anyway, as shitty as it sounded, beautiful women were a dime a dozen in Los Angeles.

  Dags was pretty jaded when it came to that.

  It wasn’t even her aura, which he realized for the first time, really realized, he cou
ldn’t see. He hadn’t seen anything around her: not so much as a glow, a spark, a hint of color.

  He couldn’t see her aura.

  What the fuck did that mean?

  That had never happened, not once since the Change.

  Some people’s auras were brighter than others.

  Some auras were weighted down with what Dags could only think of as black smoke, a kind of heavy tar that turned the light around them sluggish and indistinct and difficult to read. Auras like that sometimes even smelled bad, like they’d rotted, absorbing too much negative whatever. Some even seemed to take on a quasi-physical quality.

  This wasn’t like that.

  This wasn’t remotely like any of that.

  He couldn’t see anything around the woman in the jacuzzi.

  All he could see in his mind were her eyes.

  Not sure he could handle looking at her again, he kept his own eyes focused stubbornly on Asia, and, to a lesser extent, on that asshole with the perfect face, Karver.

  “Did you want to talk out here?” he said to Asia, gruff. “Or should I go inside? Wait for the three of you to finish up in the jacuzzi?”

  Asia laughed, thumping him on the back.

  “Come on, Angel-guy,” she said, her voice openly amused. “Veronica’s bringing your cappuccino. I told her to bring down some dessert for all of us, too.”

  Dags frowned.

  He grappled with some kind of excuse, some reason why he couldn’t do what she was saying, some reason he had to walk back upstairs and out of the house, get back on his bike and ride the hell out of there.

  He didn’t find anything.

  When he caught the hostile look on Karver’s face, along with a cloud off the other man’s aura about how badly he wanted Dags to leave⏤

  Dags found himself nodding to Asia instead.

  When the actress began to descend the stairs down to the jacuzzi, her green wrap billowing around her in the wind to reveal a neon-pink bikini, Dags found himself following.

  Chapter 12

  She’s Like You

  Dags sat down on a black, stone-like bench he hadn’t seen from the patio above, feeling awkward as he adjusted his weight.