Bottom line, all those hell-portal demons are about to fight back. If I don’t get better, fast, at using my angelic powers, I might not make it out alive.
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Bad Angel (Angels in L.A. #2)
1 / Back to Normal
DAGS JOURMAIN WAS GOING through a rough patch.
Unsurprisingly, it was about a girl.
Not a normal girl, because that’s not who Dags Jourdain was.
Not like it made much of a difference.
Strangely, all of this went through his head as he slammed into the glass window of a corner coffee shop, shattering the glass wall as he exploded through the middle of it.
He skidded across the floor, covered in glass and now blood and nicks from cuts, toppling small round tables and vinyl-padded wooden chairs. When he turned his head, looking back as he continued to skid on the tile, he focused on the hole in the glass right over a red vinyl booth.
He was waiting for her.
He knew the thing that had done this to him would follow.
The woman––if you could still call her that––leapt through the jagged opening within seconds, red eyes boring into his as she used the hole his body punched through the window to gain entrance to the inside of the café.
Her entrance was a lot more dignified than his had been, yet equally ridiculous in other respects; wearing thigh-high, red-leather boots with four-inch heels, a red leather miniskirt, and a black, sequin-covered top, she stalked over the red vinyl booth covered in glass shards with precisely-placed steps, making her way down to the tile floor.
Dark red hair flowed down her back and over each shoulder, framing a symmetrical, heart-shaped face with a sharp chin.
She looked like a movie star.
Which, he supposed, she more or less was.
Dag stared up at her, focusing on the red light he saw glowing from deep within her dark irises, the sticky, stringy black and silver of her aura where it coiled around her head, strangling the regular, human light there like an oil slick.
The two things were like a calling card.
He’d definitely been right about what she was.
She smiled down at him, her eyes colder than metal.
“I heard about you,” she said silkily, still crunching through glass to reach him. “You’re that Angel. The masochist. Why don’t you run away now, little angel? Run away, or I’m going to have to kill you, I’m afraid…”
He barely listened to her words.
One thing he’d learned these past few months: demons really liked to talk.
All of them, it seemed.
They smirked. They quipped. They threatened. They mused. They joked. They grandstanded. Some even tried to seduce him outright.
But. They. Never. Stopped. Talking.
He’d gotten to the point where he tuned most of it out.
Los Angeles, his home town, was having a demon problem of late.
Which, okay, maybe wasn’t exactly Dags’ fault––the infestation part, that is––but it wasn’t exactly not his fault, either.
He also hadn’t managed to fix the problem.
He’d been trying.
He’d been trying his damnedest, truthfully.
Initially, he tried by tackling the newly-opened demon portal itself. He’d scrubbed all the blood and trace DNA off the weird crypt below the tree under the Hollywood sign, using bleach and even a form of acid to get it all off the stone. Then he bricked up the whole damned thing, working alone of course, and in the middle of the night.
In the end, he poured cement over the bricks, covering every crack and fissure, leaving a smooth, oval plug in the trunk of the tree.
It took him a full week to finish all that.
It took him another night to dismantle the stone altar in front of the tree’s trunk and roots.
He’d thrown all the white stones into the ocean, doing all that under the cover of darkness, too.
He’d tried priests.
He’d tried a lot of priests.
He even flew in a supposed “expert” in exorcisms from the Vatican, after spending a week in Italy convincing the guy to come check it out. The priest only agreed, and then reluctantly, after Dags promised to pay his airfare, cover his hotel, all his meals, and any other expenses he might have in the United States.
Even after all that, the priest hadn’t been able to help him.
Dags went to a witch’s coven next.
One witch, a particularly perceptive one, freaked out the very first time he took her up there to see it, even though it was after he’d bricked and cemented the damned thing up. She definitely felt it, whatever it was, whatever noxious aura or energy continued to emanate from that spot. She seemed to feel it more than Dags himself did, but she still hadn’t been able to help him.
She also refused to go near it again after he showed her that first time.
He’d tried using his own abilities, what he’d dubbed “angel fire,” blasting it at the crypt and the surrounding land to try and “clear” the negative energies. He managed to burn off the worst of that black, sticky, tar-like aura, but only for a few hours.
It seethed back out from under the earth.
By the next day, it was just as strong as it had ever been.
Dags read books about portals.
He incanted Latin, burned sage, made salt circles, tried conducting rituals and spells meant to open and close portals to other dimensions. He visited so-called psychics. He read about demons, about angels, about fallen angels, about Watchers. He read about hell beasts and negative energies and crystals and ley lines.
He looked for anything he could find, no matter how crazy, that might close that damned rift for good and stop them coming here.
So far, all his efforts had accomplished diddly squat.
If anything, the problem seemed to be getting worse.
About the only glimmer of positive in all that––at least from Dags’ perspective––was that this recent crop of demons seemed to be leaving Phoenix alone.
Phoenix, in this case, being a woman, not a bird.
One of Hollywood’s rising and risen stars, Phoenix X was someone he couldn’t afford to think about anymore, but couldn’t seem to stop thinking about anyway.
This newer crop of demons was odd.
Before the hell-portal, most demons Dags encountered were pretty stupid.
When the portal first opened, they were smarter, but they all seemed to work for that Watcher, Veronica. This new crop was like a cross between the two: smarter than the regular, dumb demons, but with no specific agenda, at least none Dags could discern.
They did what he would consider more “normal” demon things.
They slept with humans. Stole cars. Killed people for fun. Robbed banks. Lit things on fire. They liked to gamble and break things and do drugs and get into fights. They liked to goad humans into doing all those things, too.
They were just smarter, stronger, harder to catch.
Worse, there were too damned many of them.
There were so many, Dags strongly suspected he wasn’t getting them all, even with all the patrolling he’d been doing. He’d been forced to prioritize, going after the newer, smarter demons first, letting some of the dumb ones slip by. He tried to go after the dumb ones later, but he was starting to miss some.
Really, there was a decent chance it was more than just “some.”
He might be missing a hell of a lot of them.
The thought disturbed him.
Still, he’d managed to track this one d
own.
She was one of the smart ones. He was getting better at spotting the precise imprint on their auras. That eye thing was usually a pretty easy marker, too.
She leapt at him, aiming her spiked heel where his neck had been.
He’d never taken his eyes off her, though.
It was usually better, he’d found, to let them get in a few good hits first, before he went after them for real. Let them think he was weaker, dumber, slower than he was.
It also gave him a chance to assess their fighting skills.
Now he rolled, shoving his weight up with one hand and completing a hard sweep with his leg, aiming for her calf. He kicked her first leg out from under her before she could bring the second one down beside it.
Her head turned, following the motion, but he hooked her foot before she could leap back up in the air.
She went down, hard.
Demons were strangely heavy.
It was another odd quirk.
Dags had noticed they were heavy like that, no matter what-sized body they took.
The red-haired demon crashed into the tile floor, cracking the tiles at her head, tailbone, back, feet. She rolled, hissing as she flipped back up to her feet. She ran at him, and that time, Dags let go of his power, throwing it out of his chest and hands at nearly full-force.
The blue-white light slammed into her, throwing her across the café floor.
It was a good thing they weren’t on a real street, in a real part of Los Angeles.
No pedestrians walked by on the sidewalk outside that window, not at this time of night, not in this part of the lot.
The café lived inside a movie studio, so while the café itself was real, and served coffee to miscellaneous crew, actors, directors, producers, execs, and whoever else… the street outside was dark, and utterly empty.
He’d lucked out in that, at least.
They weren’t doing any night shoots on this part of the lot.
The demon’s back slammed into the far wall, so loudly the crash must have been heard nearly to the studio gates. Dags hadn’t planned his trajectory well; he threw her right into a wall of glass shelves, covered with keepsake tourist mugs with the studio insignia, along with merchandising crap from the studio’s last few blockbuster films.
Pretty much all of it was ceramic and glass.
Because of course.
The demon’s body seemed to explode through the center of it, like a sonic charge.
Dags winced as every single thing on that wall got reduced to glass-like powder.
“You little shit!” She hissed at him in fury, her eyes flashing a harder, brighter red. She climbed up, slid on a broken heel, then fell on her ass in the leather skirt. “I’m going to enjoy drinking your heart right out of your chest––”
Dags didn’t bother to answer that.
He threw another bolt of the blue-white light at her, aiming for her chest. He knew it would probably make another mess on that wall of the café, but he also figured the coffee shop was probably toast at this point, regardless.
Fuck it. That was what insurance was for.
Before the bolt hit her, she threw out both of her hands.
A bright red bolt of… something… left her fingers.
That was new.
Whatever it was, it diverted the course of the blast of angel fire he’d sent at her, slamming the ball of blue-white light into the cash register at that end of the counter.
The machine made a sound like it exploded.
Dags watched in disbelief as the register crashed into the wall behind the counter, cracked more or less down the middle. Coins shot and poured out of it, dinging off the granite counter, embedding into the plaster wall. Most of the register itself landed in a sink filled with plastic blender containers, coffee filter carriers, utensils, and pint glasses. Coins from the drawer continued to empty into the metal tub.
The noise was even louder than it had been with the novelty mugs.
Dags was still staring, thrown by the sound, by the red bolt of light, by the cash register cracking down the middle––when he caught movement in his periphery and turned.
The demon was bolting.
She headed straight for the window.
Dags sent out more of the blue-green light, following her trajectory.
She was too fast; he couldn’t catch her.
He only managed to burn a line through the walls, two paintings, the top half of another vinyl booth––right before she threw herself through the window at that end of the café.
There was another resounding crash as she punched another hole through the glass.
Dags didn’t think.
He ran.
He didn’t bother following her exact trajectory across the coffee shop floor. He ran for the nearest opening in the long window instead, the same one the demon made with his body. He wasn’t even trying to catch her, not yet; for now, it was all about getting eyes on her.
It was all about speed.
It was all about getting her back in his line of sight.
He’d learned the hard way just how damned fast these things could run when they were motivated. He’d also learned once he lost them––truly lost them––he had to start the damned hunt all over again.
Some of them were remarkably good at hiding from him.
Throwing himself through the hole in the window, he pulled his legs up and kept his head down to keep from decapitating himself or slicing open any part of his skin. He landed hard on the asphalt just past the fake sidewalk, rolled, and regained his feet.
He stood in the middle of the road, panting, just across from two production bungalows.
Dags noticed for the first time that the lights were on in one.
A car was parked out front.
Then he saw him.
A man stood on the grass lawn just outside the bungalow door.
The man’s jaw hung slack above a smoldering cigarette he gripped in two fingers. He stared at Dags with eyes that looked like they might pop out of his head.
He stared at Dags like he thought he was hallucinating.
More worrying, he drank in Dags’ actual features, which he could do, since Dags stood directly under the yellow-tinged circle of a studio streetlight.
Dags couldn’t worry about that, though.
Not now.
He couldn’t worry about the guy, or his own face, or even any CCTV cameras that might be on the buildings around this part of the lot.
He should have thought of all that earlier. He should have known there’d be people here, working late. He’d been a little too distracted to notice before––first by tracking the demon, then by being thrown through the window when he finally caught up with her.
Still, he cursed inwardly anyway. He cursed even as his eyes scanned the dark street for the demon, straining to listen even as he strained his eyes, looking for movement.
He should have checked out the area better before he risked letting the demon notice him.
He never stopped staring down the road as he thought it.
He could multi-task. He could beat himself up while he hunted.
He turned his head, looking in the other direction.
Nothing.
Apparently, even high-heeled shoes didn’t slow these damned things down.
Opening his powers slightly, which entailed more of a relaxing of control than an effort, per se, he looked for her that way, too. He’d noticed he could often sense them if they were close enough. As soon as he was in more of his “angelic” state, he caught a whiff of her aura, in the direction of the studio’s semi-realistic movie lot streets.
The damned thing was already far enough away to annoy him.
She’d run for a segment down the hill from where he stood, which Dags happened to know consisted of a fake small town complete with town square, a white-painted bandstand, a row of quaint storefronts, a bank, a movie theater, a few restaurants. That area was immediately followed by a more urban-lookin
g segment of the lot, consisting of city crosswalks, apartment buildings, a modern bank, a subway exit, the bottom half of skyscrapers.
Dags had seen enough, though.
He broke into a full run.
He continued to try to pinpoint her exact location as his booted feet pounded the asphalt down the sloped road.
He tried not to think about the studio guy he’d left behind on that lawn, or how weird he probably looked, running at top speed into the backlot in the middle of the night.
He’d deal with the demon first.
He’d deal with the demon, then figure out if he needed to cover his tracks with the movie studio and the people side of things.
Even just thinking about that made him nervous, though.
In Dags’ experience, people were generally more complicated than demons.
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BAD ANGEL
(Angels in L.A. #2)
Link: https://bit.ly/ALA02-EB
JC Andrijeski is a USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author who urban fantasy, paranormal romance and mysteries, and apocalyptic science fiction, often with a sexy and metaphysical bent.
JC has a background in journalism, history and politics, and has a tendency to traipse around the globe, eat odd foods, and read whatever she can get her hands on. She grew up in the Bay Area of California, but has lived abroad in Europe, Australia and Asia, and from coast to coast in the continental United States.
She currently lives and writes full time in Los Angeles.
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