A Terrible Fall of Angels

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “I’m sorry, Zaniel, I don’t know what got into me.”

  “It’s okay, Reggie, but I would never follow you to see what you’re doing. I would trust you to tell me if there was something I needed to know.”

  “Oh, Zaniel,” she said, her voice soft and exasperated all at the same time, as if she couldn’t decide if she wanted to hug me or get mad at me again.

  “What is wrong, Reggie? Why would you block my car in like this, like you’re trying to catch me out or something?” That made me ask, “Have you been following me around to see if I’m dating someone?”

  “No, of course not,” she snapped that time, anger and that disdainful I-wouldn’t-stoop-so-low tone in her voice.

  I was tired of feeling like I’d done something wrong when I hadn’t. “You accused me of doing it, why shouldn’t I ask you the same question?”

  She opened her mouth to say something sharp and probably hurtful, but she stopped herself. She took a deep breath in and then slowly let it out as if she was counting. She was seriously angry, but I had no idea what about. It was like she was having a hugely different conversation inside her head than the one I was having with her. That wasn’t like Reggie; she was emotional, but not usually this confusing.

  “You’re right, I started this, you have every right to throw it back at me. I am sorry for jumping to stupid conclusions. Too many people giving me bad advice from their divorces, I guess.”

  “No one at work is telling me anything, except good luck with working it out.”

  “That’s very mature for a bunch of cops.” And there was the disdain back in her voice, like she couldn’t help it.

  “Well, at least the immature cops aren’t giving me bad advice that’s making me angry at you for things you haven’t even done, unlike your mature teacher friends.”

  I expected her to be angry again, but she surprised me by saying, “You’re right, my friends haven’t been giving me very good advice.”

  I didn’t know how to react to her just giving up; even if she was in the wrong, she didn’t give up on a fight this easily, but then maybe it wasn’t a fight—yet.

  “I just want to come back home with you and Connery. I’m sorry you hate my job, but I’ve been a cop the entire time you’ve known me.”

  “I know,” she said; her voice still sounded defeated, which I didn’t hear from her often. I didn’t like it, my Regina defeated.

  I wanted to touch her face, to make her smile, but I wasn’t sure how she’d take the touch, and that made my chest tight like someone had hit me over the heart. Honest, the therapist kept telling us, we needed to be honest.

  “May I touch your face?”

  “You don’t have to ask just to touch my face, Zaniel.”

  “I’m not sure of the rules, so I’ve been not touching you or looking at you, because it seemed to piss you off, so I’m asking.”

  Her lips curled upward just a little. She reached out and took my hand in hers. Even that sped my pulse, and part of me felt stupid for reacting to such a small gesture. She placed my hand against the side of her face and smiled up at me.

  I cupped the side of her face in my hand with her hand pressing against mine and it felt so right. “May I kiss you?”

  “Yes,” she said, and this time I felt her face move as she smiled up at me.

  I leaned over her and she turned her face upward to meet me, my hand still cupping the side of her face. My lips touched hers, and the first thought was how soft they were, and then the slight thickness of her lipstick stopped me, because I knew it would smear. She didn’t like to have it smeared in public, especially when she was wearing base makeup. Her mouth tasted sweet and alive, but the lipstick was bitter; a lot of the darker lipsticks tasted that way.

  I drew back to stare down into her face, which was still raised up toward me like an offering. I couldn’t see through the dark glasses to see if her eyes were closed or if she was gazing up at me. It wasn’t until I felt her face move slightly against my hand that I realized she’d opened her eyes. For some reason the fact that she’d closed her eyes made me even happier than the kiss alone had.

  She moved her head, so I dropped my hand away. “Why did you stop kissing me?” she asked.

  “You hate it when I smear your lipstick all over your base.”

  “I don’t hate it,” she said.

  I almost said, out loud, You could have fooled me, but luckily, I was smarter than that and said, “You’ve told me not to smear your lipstick, especially when you’re wearing base.”

  She leaned her hands against my chest, putting her body weight behind it. I started to put my arms around her automatically but hesitated partway through.

  “Hold me, Zaniel,” she said.

  I wrapped my arms around her, and she leaned into the hug for the first time in longer than I could remember. I finally felt free to smile, but I was still tense holding her, waiting for her to pull away or tell me I’d overstepped my bounds. What had once been so natural and easy between us had become a minefield that I no longer knew how to walk.

  “Hold me, Zaniel.”

  “I am holding you,” I said.

  “Your arms are around me, but I can feel that you’re all tense like you can’t relax. What’s wrong? Don’t you want to hold me?”

  “More than anything else in the world.”

  “Then relax,” she said.

  I was almost afraid to, but I tried to let go of the tension in my shoulders and arms. It was like I was poised for fight or flight. I realized I was scared, which seemed ridiculous; Reggie wasn’t dangerous. And then another part of me whispered that she was more dangerous than any gun or knife. They could only take my life; she was killing parts of me that the hospital couldn’t put back together.

  “Zaniel,” she whispered. She slid her arms around my waist and pressed her body to the front of mine. The feel of it went through me in a wave of need that made me close my eyes so she wouldn’t see it, but I couldn’t hide my body’s reaction to her. She wiggled her hips against me, and I shuddered. God help me, I had better control than this.

  I tried to step back, but she held on. I heard a sound that was almost a whimper and realized it was me. “Let me go, please.”

  “Why?” She made it breathy and sexual, her phone sex operator voice I’d called it when we were dating.

  “Because our date isn’t until next week.” My voice sounded choked and gravelly, that bass growl that usually came only during sex, or a great deal more foreplay than this.

  “I love that I can still make you react like this,” she said.

  I looked at her; she had that teasing, happy look that if we’d been living together would have meant something. Now this was the closest I’d been to any woman in over six months, and I had to go to work, had to look at what they’d found at the Cookson house, had to help find a demon and the sorcerer it was riding. Mark Cookson might not be a real sorcerer with all the power that implied, but he had to have done sorcerous magic that used demons as its fuel and power base or he wouldn’t have a demon sharing his body.

  “And there it is, you went away into your head and the case, right? It was the case, wasn’t it?”

  She let me go when I stepped back again. She was back to being angry and I was about to join her. “I want you, but I can’t have you now, and I have to go in to work and not be thinking of you, because if I do then I can’t do my job.”

  “You used to like it when I teased you.”

  “When I knew I was coming home to you and the teasing would be satisfied, yes, very much yes, but not like this, Reggie.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like it’s a game, like you do X and I react Y. I love the sense of power it gives you, because it turns you on, and that turns me on. I love that you touched me today, that you let me touch you, hold you, kiss you, but I have to go, and I can’t be wound up like this and have to leave, and have to go home alone.”

  “You really haven’t been with anyone e
lse since we separated, have you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  She looked at me like she was trying to memorize my face. “I’m sorry, Zaniel.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  “For a lot of things, but I’m sorry I teased you and then you have to go to work. I’m sorry I’m not ready to have you come home tonight and let me make good on the teasing. You’re right, this was mean if I didn’t mean to follow through.”

  “Thank you for the apology, but if you didn’t mean it, why did you do it?” It was my turn to study her face. I wished she wasn’t wearing the huge sunglasses. They were new since I’d moved out. I didn’t like them on her; they hid too much of her face, more like a mask than glasses. Then I thought, This is Reggie, I know her, stop being a lovestruck teenager and be a grown-up cop. I didn’t need to see her whole face to read her.

  “Couldn’t I have just wanted to be close to you?” she asked, but the moment she worded it that way I knew that wasn’t why she’d done it.

  “No,” I said, just that, while I forced myself to notice her body language and what parts of her face I could see rather than her body.

  “What do you mean, no? I want you, Zaniel. The sex has always been amazing.”

  I didn’t want to have this conversation in the parking lot. It was just us, but there were security cameras; they almost certainly wouldn’t be able to hear what we said, but it still seemed too personal to be out in the open. “This doesn’t seem like a conversation for the parking lot,” I said.

  “Why, because you have to rush off to work?” she said, falling back into the irritation bordering on anger that had been her typical with me for a while.

  “No, because I don’t want to talk about our personal life in a parking lot with security cameras.”

  She looked up as if she were searching for a bird that had just flown overhead. “I don’t see them.”

  “Try the building entrance and the secondary entrance just two cars past here.”

  She looked where I directed and saw them. She looked out at the parking lot behind us. “Is that another one attached to a light pole?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t have looked for them.”

  “It’s my job to notice things like that.”

  “Okay, you’ve made your point,” she said, still irritated, but calmer.

  “I want to talk more, Reggie, but just not here.”

  She licked her lips, which meant she was nervous, especially when she was wearing lipstick. “I don’t want to wait a week to finish this talk,” she said.

  The fact that she wanted to see me sooner than our “date” ran through me like something electric, as if hope could have current to jolt from my fingers to my scalp. Why did that make me feel more hopeful than her rubbing herself up against me? I didn’t know, and I didn’t care.

  “Yes, I mean, I agree I’d like to finish this talk before we meet for dinner.”

  She smiled then, and even with the sunglasses on I knew that the smile filled her eyes with that light that was warm and mischievous and sexy, and which I’d learned lately was only a few drops away from cruel, but it wasn’t cruel today.

  “Dinner date,” she said, voice low and throaty, her phone sex voice again.

  I should have just accepted the win, but it was too confusing, so I said, “Just a few minutes ago you were mad when I called it a date.”

  “Zaniel, I’m calling it a date now, don’t push it.” The voice was not sexy when she said it, but she wasn’t irritated with me, just impatient.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  She grinned at me, not sexy, but just her. “You’re the only man who ever said that to me, like you’re saying ‘Yes, sir.’ ”

  I smiled back. “In the army it means the same thing.”

  “I remember,” she said. “Let’s do a lunch this weekend where we can talk this out, so when we have the dinner it can be a real date without having to worry about all this.”

  I wasn’t sure what all this was, and I really doubted that one lunch conversation would clear up everything that had gone wrong between us, but I didn’t push it. “Sounds good,” I said.

  “Good, I know when you’re on a case this serious that you don’t know your schedule, but let’s try for brunch or lunch tomorrow. My mom will be happy to babysit Connery if she knows we’re trying to work things out,” she said, and there was that easy confidence in her that I hadn’t seen in weeks, maybe longer.

  “I won’t know my schedule, but I promise that I will do everything I can to see you tomorrow for at least an hour. I want to work things out, Reggie, I really do.”

  “Me, too, Zaniel,” she said.

  We had that awkward moment where we weren’t sure if we should kiss goodbye. In the end she said, “We better not risk another kiss, or we might get carried away, cameras or no cameras.”

  I was almost certain she didn’t mean it, but I took the upbeat teasing and ran with it. “That would be a shame,” I said, putting the heat and eagerness into my words and face that she wanted. If she’d pushed it, I wouldn’t have gone through with it, and probably she wouldn’t have either. She was a high school teacher; she couldn’t afford that kind of scandal. Even with her husband. As a cop, getting caught making out with my wife wouldn’t be encouraged, but I wouldn’t get in serious trouble.

  Reggie laughed then, happy with my response. “I’ll move my car so you can go catch the bad guys.” She moved past me between my car and the one parked beside us, so that she had to brush lightly against me. It wasn’t the body language of earlier, but it still stole my breath for a moment. She trailed her fingers down my arm as she moved past, getting her keys out of her pocket. She always kept a small key ring so if her purse got stolen, they wouldn’t have her house keys. A friend in college had gotten mugged and then the guy had cleaned out her apartment with the keys later that week.

  I don’t know what made me go for broke, but I called after her, “Would it be pushing it if I told you I love you?”

  She flashed me that sexy grin over her shoulder as she rounded the back of her car. “No, I love you, too.”

  Another little jolt of electric hope shot through me. It felt like my hair should be standing on end from it, but I knew it didn’t show like that.

  She got in her car, started the engine, and drove off, waving at me in the rearview mirror. I waved back until I knew she couldn’t see me. I stood there just letting the last few minutes sink in; I wasn’t sure how a promising therapy session had turned into a fight, and then into a kiss and two dates, but for once I didn’t poke at it. I took the win and got in my car. I’d talk to Charleston. He’d do his best to see that I got to see Reggie tomorrow. No guarantees on a case like this, but he’d do his best. Heck, everyone on the squad would help me see her tomorrow, at least all the regulars that knew Reggie, and the new people wouldn’t interfere. We actually had more successfully married couples in our unit than most of the other special squads. Charleston tried to run a family-friendly shop, and Ravensong as his second was seriously into happy wife, happy life. She and Louie had been together twenty-five years and married as soon as it was legal for same-sex couples to marry. Since they couldn’t get married any sooner, I counted our unit as having three couples that had passed the twenty-five-year mark and were all still blissful together. For the first time in months, I prayed that Reggie and I would celebrate our seventh anniversary with me back in the house with her and Connery. You can pray for anything, but I try not to pray if I think it will take a miracle unless it’s life and death. Being without my family felt like I was dying, but I wasn’t; I was miserable, but I wasn’t dying. Today I let myself pray that the talk tomorrow would go well, and the date would go better. We had two months until our anniversary; that didn’t seem like it needed a miracle, not if Reggie and I both wanted it. I hoped we did. I prayed we did.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Lila was waiting for me at the head of the stairs ins
ide the door that gave us the privacy of the landing, because almost everyone else but Charleston and me took the elevator. I must have looked surprised, because she said, “I wanted to be sure and talk to you before Adam Thornton found me again.”

  I frowned at her, confused now instead of surprised. “Why are you hiding from Adam? I know he can be annoying, but he’s not that bad.”

  “He wants the evidence that we took from the parents’ house.”

  “He is the medical examiner’s assistant, so she probably sent him.”

  “I have Dr. Trent’s permission to show you the items before they go to her lab.”

  I widened my eyes at that. “Why would the evidence go to the ME anyway?” I asked.

  “Because it’s biologicals, and anything that came off a living person or being goes to the ME now.”

  “Unless it needs special magical protection,” I said.

  Lila nodded. “Then it goes to the most appropriate authorized body, or organization, or personage that is best capable of dealing with it in a safe and sane manner that does not endanger themselves, the public, or any property or person that might be impacted by said evidence.”

  “Wow, I’m impressed that you’ve got that memorized,” I said.

  “I didn’t, but I do after Mr. Adam Thornton has repeated it to me like a hundred times while we waited on you.”

  “If you have the ME’s permission, why is he here?” I asked.

  “Because she sent him along to make sure that the evidence goes to her lab after we’ve investigated it fully,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  “That means we have time to look at it magically,” I said.

  “By our definition of ‘investigated fully,’ yes, but Adam’s interpretation is a lot different from ours.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I am hiding in a stairwell, Havoc, hoping I can sneak you in to look at the evidence without Adam Thornton hanging all over us.”