A Terrible Fall of Angels

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “Shoulda, coulda, but didn’t,” Bridges said.

  “That’s not how possession works, not even physical possession.”

  “Nothing about this possession was normal,” Charleston said.

  Hazel Prescott ushered me down the hall. “Let’s see if you need stitches, then you can come back and start figuring out where our patient and your suspect went.”

  “I’ll question the new guy,” Lila Bridges said, motioning with her thumb at Sato, who was still waiting in the hallway where I’d left him.

  “Thanks, Bridges,” I said.

  “No problem.” She turned back, the brown ponytail bouncing as she moved. She’d made it high up on her head today, which had always been one of my favorite looks on a girl going back to elementary school. I closed my eyes and shook my head. I knew better than to date anyone in our unit; that never ended well.

  “I thought you were comforting me,” Gimble said to her.

  She quirked a smile at him, giving her own cynical look, except her eyes were empty cop eyes that gave nothing away. “You’ve still got an IV hanging out of your arm.”

  He looked down at it as if he’d just noticed. “Ow,” he said, because like so many things it only hurts when you notice it. Broken hearts are like that, too.

  I followed Hazel down the hallway and tried not to notice the way her uniform fit from the back. I tried to think what I’d say to Kate and was happy that I’d been all covered in angel magic when I held her naked in my arms. It meant I would have more objectivity when I saw her again. God, I needed a date.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Paulson had passed Gonzales the nurse to a surgical team, so he was the one who patched me up. Paulson had me take my shirt off and drop my pants so low I had to hold my gun in place and let everything else slide around. He’d wanted to make sure there were no wounds that I’d missed from the fight. I’d have liked to argue but I knew that sometimes in the heat of battle, or even fighting demons, you don’t always feel every wound at first. Paulson inspected my abdomen so long and so closely that I finally asked, “What’s wrong, Doc, sad that you don’t get to stitch me up?”

  Paulson had to raise his face up to see me; he’d been bending that low over my stomach. “You should be hurt enough for stitches. You took more damage from the woman’s fingernails than the demon’s claws; how, why?”

  I debated on what to tell him and finally settled for most of the truth. “It’s a side effect of the angelic energy.”

  “So that healed the demon injuries?”

  “Partially?”

  “Why didn’t it heal it completely?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why didn’t it heal the scratches from the woman?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Paulson frowned at me. “Are you holding back information?”

  I rose up on my elbows and the scratches where Kate had scored her nails down my skin were a sharp, immediate pain, compared to the dull ache of the abdominal scratches. The ones there felt like the injuries had healed for a few days already, while the scratches on my arm felt fresh. One of the things I’d missed most, other than the friends I’d left behind at the College, had been the healing ability. It had lingered for a few months and then I was just as mortal as anyone else. There’d been moments in the army when I missed the angels for a lot of reasons.

  “Angels can heal people if God allows it; people who are angel touched can sometimes heal people, too. Gimble was angel touched, and I . . . knew how to hijack the energy and use it to protect us.”

  “I’ve been hearing versions of what you did from staff that witnessed it.” He raised a skeptical eyebrow at me. “I didn’t believe most of it until I saw how healed the claw marks are on you. After seeing what they did to Gonzales . . .” He stopped talking and just shook his head. “He had you pinned in the hallway for at least five minutes, but you’re intact.”

  “I told you it’s a side effect of the angels. If I’d been thinking more clearly, I might have tried to use the energy to heal me completely before the wings faded away.”

  “Some people saw wings, but others saw . . . other things.” He sounded a little grim when he said the last part.

  I almost asked what the others had seen, but I wasn’t certain I wanted to know. I’d used angel magic in a way I hadn’t attempted in over a decade, and it had worked. God hadn’t turned his grace from me, and neither had the angels. They could be more judgmental than the Big Guy sometimes.

  “I’ll bandage up your arm. Will antibiotics work on demon wounds?”

  “This demon was more solid and real than any that I’ve ever touched, so use what you’d use if he was just a monster and not an Infernal. Even if it doesn’t help, it won’t hurt.”

  Paulson nodded. “Good to know since we’re pumping Gonzales full of them. How about a tetanus shot?”

  “Unknown, but again it can’t hurt,” I said.

  He nodded again. “How long has it been since you had a tetanus booster?”

  “I’m up-to-date. Got shoved into a pile of scrap metal last year.”

  I hissed when he put cream on the scratches that Kate had carved into me. I knew that a woman’s nails could leave marks, but these seemed deeper, or maybe it had just been so long since I’d had a woman’s nails on me, I didn’t remember.

  “Do they seem deeper than normal?” I asked.

  “This is usually what we see if a woman fights back from an attack.”

  “So I’ve just never had a woman try to hurt me that much, but it’s ‘normal’?” I made quote marks in the air with the hand he wasn’t bandaging up.

  “I can’t share patient information with you, but no, this level of damage from human scratches isn’t normal.” He looked at me as he said it, as if he was trying to tell me something with just the look. Whatever he was trying to say I was missing it. My face must have shown it because he frowned and raised the eyebrow again. “I’ve said all I can, Detective Havoc.”

  “Detective Havelock; Havoc is just a nickname,” I said.

  He half smiled, then shook his head. “Good to know, because Detective Havoc sounds like a comic book hero.”

  “Dr. Havoc would be worse, that sounds like a comic book villain.”

  He laughed then. “It really does.” He finished patching me up and then he escorted me to Kate.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Kate looked younger lying in the new bed in a hospital gown that seemed even larger than the last one, so that her figure was completely hidden. She was only about five foot six standing, so lying down she seemed even smaller. With her brown curls tousled on the pillow and the big brown eyes she looked childlike. It made me wonder if she was Mark Cookson’s age. God, had I gotten so needy that I couldn’t tell a teenager when I saw one?

  “I don’t remember the demon hurting your arm,” she said, looking at the bandages.

  “It didn’t,” I said.

  She turned her face away from me on the pillow so that all those brown curls spilled over her face. I fought the urge to brush the curls away until I could see her better. I couldn’t tell if it was a parental gesture because she looked so fragile lying there, or if I just wanted an excuse to touch her, so I kept my hands to myself.

  “I’m sorry, Zaniel, I’m so sorry,” she said, voice hoarse. I couldn’t tell if it was from screaming or emotion.

  “You don’t have to be sorry, Kate, not for anything. I’m just sorry that I couldn’t have gotten you out of the room sooner.” It was my turn to look away; I didn’t want to see her looking so fragile, knowing that if I’d only gotten her free sooner . . . Heaven help me, Heaven help her, because we were both going to need it after today.

  “I was the one who hurt you, so I should be the one who’s sorry,” she said.

  That made me look at her again. She was looking straight at me now, her brown eyes staring up at me through the tangle of her hair. So she looked like a frightened little girl and then her eyes filled up with
. . . her, I guess, and suddenly I knew she was no child, no teenager, because you had to be older than that to have a force of personality like that in your eyes. Something eased in my chest and I didn’t feel like a dirty thirty-year-old guy who was hitting on teenagers at the mall. Men like that had creeped me out when I was a teenager; my opinion of them had never changed. I didn’t always know what kind of man I wanted to be when I grew up, but I knew not that.

  “You’re stronger than you look,” I said, trying to make it light.

  “It wasn’t human strength that cut your arm.”

  I looked at her, not sure what to say. I tried for light again. “Is there something I should know?” I even smiled, but she didn’t smile back.

  “My ancestors are originally from Russia.”

  “I’m an all-American mongrel, maybe a little extra Irish thrown into the mix,” I said, and again I smiled, trying to lighten the mood, but she wasn’t going to let me lighten anything.

  She stared up at me through that tangle of hair with those big, dark eyes. The strength and fire of her seemed to be burning deep in them, as if brown eyes could be flame. “Do you know any Russian folktales, Zaniel?”

  I shook my head.

  “Do you know who Baba Yaga was?”

  “She was the crone witch, the original wicked witch that lured children to be eaten, right?”

  “Some of that’s true. Baba Yaga did take bad children away to cook and eat them, or maybe she adopted them and raised them as her own and taught them her magic, or maybe she captured someone’s child and a father petitioned her to save his family, or maybe he wanted treasure, or a question answered badly enough to risk the Baba’s magic and trickery, because make no mistake if you give her a chance to trick you, she will and if she wins, you die. That part is very, very true.”

  I didn’t know why I was getting the CliffsNotes about the Russian bogeyman—sorry, woman—but I didn’t interrupt her. She was too earnest, and her eyes through her hair seemed like the eyes of an animal that you just glimpse through the leaves. I fought the urge to shiver as she continued.

  “What we do know is that my great-great-great-grandfather slept with the Baba Yaga and not only survived to tell the tale but had good luck from that time forward. Any business he started prospered, any bet he made he won, it was like all the fates were on his side until the day he died at a hundred and three.”

  “Good genetics,” I said.

  She stared up at me with those feral eyes, lost in the wilderness of her own hair, and said, “The Baba would have kept a girl child, but it was a boy and she laid it on his doorstep one night for him to raise. That was my great-great-grandfather who had a son who became my great-grandfather who had a son . . .”

  “So, you’re saying that your great-great-great-grandmother was the Baba Yaga?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, and she looked at me as if waiting for me to be angry, or disgusted, or something negative. Her eyes almost dared me to say something bad.

  I smiled at her. “Glad you didn’t inherit her iron fingernails; you’d have done a lot more damage.”

  “That’s exactly what I inherited,” she said.

  I frowned at her. “I’d have noticed that, Kate. Your nails may be harder than normal, but they aren’t iron.”

  “They were before I came here to have a magic therapy that one of their specialists created to help make me more human.”

  “Not just iron fingernails, then?” I asked.

  She shook her head so that her hair fell around her face and finally slid to one side like a curtain to show her pale face with those golden freckles across her nose and cheeks. If I’d had to guess her heritage, I’d have thought Irish, or Scottish.

  “Do you want to tell me what else the therapy was supposed to change?” I asked, voice soft.

  “No,” she whispered.

  “Then you don’t have to tell me.”

  “If I hadn’t had the therapy to change my nails and teeth to something more human, I could have fought the demon off myself. I was stronger than a human woman my size, but I had to give the strength up to lose the nails and teeth. I wanted to be normal. I didn’t want to be a monster anymore, but today a monster could have fought that thing off me. I’d have had the strength to help you open that door. It wouldn’t have put anything inside me. I could have saved myself, damn it! But I wanted to be like everyone else, to have a normal life.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with wanting that, Kate.”

  “You see the irony, though, right?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I see it,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t have needed you to save me, I could have saved myself, and instead I’m like everyone else, a victim, like everyone else.”

  She started to cry then, and I tried to find something to say that would help, or make any of it better, but thankfully Hazel came and saved us both.

  Hazel mouthed, Thank you, and then she showed me the door. There was a new doctor coming through as I left. This one was a woman. I guessed that was better than a male doctor, if anything would have made any of this day better for the Baba Yaga’s great-great-great-granddaughter.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I was relieved to go back to the hallway and talk about demons and angels or anything but what had happened to Kate and what was about to happen. She wasn’t the first victim that I hadn’t been in time to save who needed a rape kit, but I always prayed that it would be my last time, that from this point on I would save them all, save everyone. I knew better, knew it was impossible to save everyone, but there was part of me that still agreed with my twenty-something self that we should be able to do it. Younger me might have waited in the hallway as if that helped, but me now . . . I’d have rather wrestled another demon than had to stay in the room and hold her hand during it, even if it would have been appropriate.

  The crime scene techs filled the hallway; they were all dressed in full plastic gear. It wasn’t hazmat gear with its own oxygen, but it was close. They looked like something out of a science fiction movie and I suddenly felt underdressed.

  I looked at Charleston. “Is there something I should know? Why are they all wrapped up like it’s contagious?”

  “This is the new protocol for all the medical examiner’s staff on a case with unknown supernatural elements, according to the techs. The ones who are straight normal had a few issues with magical evidence, so now everyone must wear the gear on supernatural crime scenes regardless of whether they’re norm or magic.”

  “How is this going to save them from a spell?” Lila asked.

  “It’s supposed to be imbued with a counterspell that protects from most magic or psychic interference.”

  “It doesn’t feel like an enchanted or holy item, I mean I don’t feel any power coming off the gear,” I said.

  “Me either, but it’s like most equipment—you won’t know until it gets tested in the field.”

  I looked at the hallway full of the suited evidence techs, police, new hospital staff that I didn’t know on sight. “Glad the elevators are working again,” I said.

  He glanced back at some of the officers in our own unit, frowning. “Yeah, because not everyone made it up the stairs in time for the action. Maybe I should put through mandatory cardio as a prerequisite for being on our unit.”

  I shrugged without commenting just in case some of my fellow officers were listening. They gave me enough shit about how much I worked out. If it was work out or be home alone in the small apartment without my family . . . the gym was a lot less lonely.

  Charleston flashed a grin at me and patted my back like we were on a sports team and I’d scored a point. “You’re already doing more cardio than I am, Havoc, so not your problem.”

  Lila came over and said, “He hangs out with Richardson too much.”

  “Yeah, Havoc, way to overachieve, having one of the SWAT guys as your workout partner,” Detective Carlos Antero said. He damn near waddled over to us with his gut leading the way.
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br />   “He wasn’t in SWAT when we started working out together,” I said. In my head, I thought Hash, short for Hashim, had wanted a workout partner to help him get in shape to make SWAT, and I was freshly separated. Working out with Hash had saved my sanity and gotten him into SWAT. Now I was working out with him and some of the other SWAT guys. I was in the best shape of my life, better than in the army. I was also depressed and homesick in a way I hadn’t been even on deployment in the army.

  “You said you were working out with Richardson until he made SWAT,” Lila said.

  “I like the workout,” I said.

  “You’re making us look bad, Havoc,” Carlos said.

  “You give us old guys a bad rep, Antero,” Charleston said, patting his own flat abs.

  Carlos just grinned and rubbed his stomach in a way that was almost sexual. “My Carla knows how to cook for a man, it’s one of the reasons I married her.”

  “I think she’s trying to feed you into a heart attack, so she gets your life insurance and then she can marry some young Hispanic stud,” Lila said.

  “She eats as much as I do, but she’s still my colibrí.”

  I knew colibrí was Spanish for hummingbird because Carlos called his wife that more than her real name. She was still fit and trim and looked twenty years younger than he did. She was also a Pilates and yoga instructor at the gym she co-owned with her twin sister. They both kept trying to fix me up with unmarried nieces and cousins. They considered being separated a prelude to divorce, so why wait? I hadn’t told anyone at work that Reggie had said we should both try dating other people; it would have made them work even harder to find me someone.

  “Did you find Cookson’s body yet?” I asked.

  The smiles left everyone’s faces, which meant whatever they’d found was bad. It was just a matter of how bad; maybe I’d be rethinking whether I preferred the emotional violence of Kate’s pain or the physical violence of the fight scene once I saw what was left of him.

  “Yes and no,” Charleston said at last.