by Brian Fuller
To keep up appearances, they started at the end of the street and worked their way up. Thirty-five Pearson—the house on the other side of 37—was also occupied by a Dread. She was an older woman with stringy black-and-gray hair whose face had collected the bitterness from every bad divorce. She shut the door in their faces before they could even begin their unpolished sales pitch.
“We need to do the other side of the street,” Dolorem said, eyes hardening. “Something sinister is going on here.”
They plied their ruse across the street, finding yet a third Dread directly across from the house at 37 Pearson, a middle-aged African American. He stared at them like they were insects until they finished their pitch, and then slammed the door in their faces.
“Is there a street on the other side of the house?” Helo asked. What had Cassandra gotten him into?
“I think it’s just woods back there as a buffer for the highway,” Dolorem said as they finally approached 37 Pearson. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Three Dreads just hanging out in suburbia, all bracketing a single house? Who could be so important they would keep twenty-four-seven surveillance on a house? Aclima’s little story about being compelled to do someone’s bidding sounds more and more plausible by the minute. There’s no way Dreads would just park themselves here. I wonder how long it’s been like this?”
“One way to find out,” Helo said, rapping on the white door at 37 Pearson. The older of the two boys they had seen earlier in the yard answered. While only around seven years old, he radiated confidence and looked them straight in the eye.
“Hey, is your mom or dad home?” Helo asked.
“Yeah, one minute. Mom! Door’s for you!”
A woman in her early thirties came to the door wearing an apron and smiling at them while drying her hands on a dish towel. The robust scent of spaghetti sauce followed her to the door. She was a pretty woman with delicate features, though her thin lips and tired eyes colored her with a serious air. Until she smiled. The friendly gesture cast off the shadows of a tired face framed by long brown hair.
“Hello, Mrs., uh—” Helo began.
“Morse. Or call me Angelina.”
“Great. Well, Mrs. Morse, I’m Tom, and this is Brady. We’re actually here representing the girl’s high school volleyball team.” This admission elicited a smirk from their potential customer. “Yeah, I know. They asked us to help, so . . . you know.”
Angelina’s smile expanded. “I think I understand.”
“Well, um, great, so, they’re only twenty bucks, and they go to help pay for equipment and trips and stuff. They have lots of great discounts to places in town and pay for themselves really fast.”
“I’m sorry, guys, but I just can’t afford it right now, okay?”
Helo’s mind spun. They needed to get into the house. “Um—”
Dolorem bailed him out. “Tell you what. We’ll give you one if we can get a drink and use the bathroom.”
“You don’t have to do that,” she said. “But come in, and I’ll get you something.”
“Thank you so much!”
She stepped aside, telling the older boy to show Dolorem the way. “I’ll go get some water,” she said, heading into the kitchen.
It took Helo a few moments to figure out why the place felt so much like home, but everything familiar from his own boyhood homes was here. Furniture nicked and stained by a couple of boys. Secondhand electronics. Walls covered with medals and pictures of military men. Angelina’s younger son, who looked to be about six, watched him while he took it all in.
Helo walked to the entertainment center, where a host of pictures covered the top. He nearly dropped his cards.
There, front and center, sat the wedding picture of Mr. David and Mrs. Angelina Morse.
And Mr. David Morse was none other than the young and handsome Goldbow. Pictures clustered around the wedding photos, snapshots of the Morses through the years with their babies, with Goldbow and his parents, Goldbow and his SEAL team. This was Goldbow’s family.
“Here you go!” Angelina said.
Helo took the glass, fighting to keep his hand steady. “So this is your husband?”
“Yep.”
“When did he die?”
She scrunched her eyes together. “Dead? He’s not dead. What made you think that?”
Helo looked down. A wedding ring encircled her finger. “Oh, sorry. I just thought this looked like a shrine, you know? My grandma had one for my grandpa after he died.”
“Well,” she said, “he’s certainly gone enough to seem like he’s dead. The military even told me he was dead once. But that was just a mix-up or a cover-up. I’ve had a lot of people ask me if I’m a widow or divorced or what. He’s got one of those jobs where he can’t even talk about what he’s doing.”
“Oh, right,” Helo said, heart constricting as he fought to keep up his fake breathing. Tela’s song popped into his mind. She had seen everything in her dream.
Here’s an Angel in chains
Chains of pictures and frames
Links of smiles and delight
Bonds of pleasure and pain
Goldbow had a family. His love for them spilled out of every picture frame. His love chained him to the dark powers he was meant to destroy. Helo couldn’t pull his eyes from the pictures. The truth barreled at him like a freight train traveling at four hundred miles an hour while he stood dumbstruck on the tracks. At last the difficult pieces of the puzzle found a home, the implications of those beautiful photographs strangling him.
Dolorem exited the bathroom, and Angelina handed him his glass. Voice barely a mumble, Helo thanked Angelina and pulled Dolorem out the door before he had drained half his cup. Dolorem remembered to leave a discount card as they left the friendly Angelina Morse and her beautiful boys and headed out into the street.
“Are you okay?” Dolorem asked.
“You didn’t see it?”
“Not much out of the ordinary.”
“That’s Goldbow’s family,” Helo stammered.
“That tall guy who likes Cassandra?”
“Yes.”
“So his family before he died. Why would Dreads be watching them?”
Helo shook his head. “It’s worse than that. They are still his family.”
“How can . . . well, you’re not saying that . . . but . . . oh no.”
The first rule drilled into every Ash Angel was to leave all previous family and friends behind. From his brief experience with Terissa, Helo knew firsthand the power of old emotions and connections. But as he considered all that their discovery might portend, the one that punched a hole in his heart was the realization of what it would mean to Cassandra. Goldbow 44-2ing her during a mission had nearly killed her. Goldbow two-timing her with his wife would take a heart just now warming back up and cast it back into a harsh winter. Throw in that the Dreads were camped out around Goldbow’s family—no doubt to force his compliance—and the whole situation turned too ugly for Helo to process.
“What do we do, Helo?” Dolorem asked. “We’ve got to assume the Dreads are in contact with each other and probably some handler. If we try to take them out, there’s a good chance the family gets killed.”
Helo knew who to call. The new head of Gabriel Operations.
Chapter 33
Larry
Helo gritted his teeth. “This is critical,” he said. The Ash Angel operator kept trying to divert him to lower levels of management. “Look, I want you to get five words in front of Ramis’s face, okay? Cassandra, Goldbow, Leak, Call Helo. Got it? You don’t do this, it’s your butt that’s going to do Sanctus Time until a Dread dunks you in a tub!”
The man let out an exasperated “I’ll try,” and the phone went dead. Helo stuffed it in his pocket and pulled out his normal phone, thumb hovering over the speed dial button that would call Cassandra. He couldn’t do it. He kept trying to convince himself he needed more information before he upended her life, but he knew the real reas
on he couldn’t punch the button: fear. He kept fumbling for a way he could spin it for her to take the edge off, but he could hear her voice in his head. “Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining, Jarhead!”
“We’ve got to move, Helo,” Dolorem said, voice soft. “We’ve got to get morphed back into adults and hole up until you get instructions.”
“This is going to wreck her,” Helo said, pocketing his normal phone. “What am I supposed to do?”
Dolorem took him by the shoulders. “This wasn’t your doing, Helo. Even angels can’t fix everything. You can only care for her and hope it’s enough.”
He shook his head. “It won’t be enough.”
Helo’s Ash Angel phone buzzed and he answered it.
“This is Helo.”
“This is Athena from Archus Ramis’s office. What is your Ash Angel name and ID?”
“My name is Helo, and I don’t have one. You know who I am.”
“Please wait while you are transferred to Archus Ramis’s office.”
Moments later, Archus Ramis’s grating voice scratched over the speaker. “You have one minute.”
One minute turned into ten.
Ramis, voice quavering, drilled him for information like a military interrogator and then sat in silence long enough for Helo to wonder if he was still there.
“You know what this will do to Cassandra,” Helo said, trying to prompt him to say something.
“I know.” Ramis’s voice was a lifeless wasteland. “Look, Helo, you need to clear the area so that the Dreads aren’t alerted. I’m going to send a team to Winchester, just east of there. With any luck, they will be there before dawn. I need you to meet them and brief them on the situation. Can you do that?”
“Yes. What about Cassandra?”
“I need you to take the phone she’s contacting you with and destroy it. I need to get her into Deep 7 before she finds out, and I’m going to use you as bait. We’ll take Goldbow separately. Do not speak to Cassandra from this point forward, understood?”
“Understood. Get Magdelene there if you can.”
“She’ll be coming to you in Winchester. You’ll come in together when this is tied down. Your phone will stay activated from this point forward. You did the right thing, Helo. The repercussions of this will . . . well, keep me apprised.”
Helo relayed the information to Dolorem. “You don’t have to be involved in this if you don’t want to, but I’d like you to stay if it won’t violate your Old Master principles or whatever.”
Dolorem nodded. “I’m with you. I may not like the organization, but this is important. Besides, I’d like to say hi to Maggie since she’s been so good about trying to re-recruit me every year.”
Magdelene didn’t touch her orange juice or Sausage McMuffin. She wore her red hair short, hidden underneath a forest-green baseball cap. Tight jeans hugged her long legs, puffy jacket concealing a BBG. Helo wondered if she was the right one for the job. She looked pale, rage and sorrow brewing behind her eyes.
Corinth, also in a cap, jeans, and puffy coat, sat next to her, face twisted in a scowl while Magdelene dumped everything she knew about Angelina Morse. Only Dolorem had the will to eat, bright yellow wrappers scattered about his tray.
“She works thirty-six hours a week in a convenience store, and her boys go to school,” Magdelene continued. “By mail statements, this charade of Goldbow’s has been going on for a couple years now, and it explains a lot. When Cassie and Goldbow were dating, I remember her mentioning that Goldbow seemed to have a lot of little missions he had to go on for Archus Mars. It struck me as strange at the time. I was Goldbow’s direct superior since he was assigned to a Gabriel team. Still, Archus Mars isn’t much for jurisdictional boundaries, so I didn’t give it much thought. Turns out Goldbow was visiting his family whenever he could. The lies that man has told would stack to the moon and back.”
“So why does the dude still have a white aura?” Corinth asked, voice heavy with indignation. “I mean, if he is the source of the leak, he’s caused a lot of death and destruction.”
“That’s one I’m sure the philosophers in the Sanctus and Scholus will have to work on,” Magdelene replied.
Helo stuck a fork in his pancakes to keep up pretenses. “Have they moved on Goldbow or told Cassandra yet?”
“No,” Magdelene said. “And they won’t until we get the situation under control here. I know we’re all thinking of Cassandra, but helping her is not the goal right now. We have to get the family out. The Scholus is working up a witness-protection type story and concocting the second death of David Morse. We can’t move until that is ready.”
Corinth took a sip of orange juice and leaned back. “Doesn’t seem that hard. We each pick a door, bam! bam! bam!, three dead Dreads and we watch the house until the Scholus does its thing.”
Dolorem snorted like that was the stupidest idea ever.
“Not so simple,” Magdelene disagreed. “You’re forgetting something, Corinth. I think you all are. Here’s a field exam for you, Helo. What’s wrong with Corinth’s plan?”
Something that had gnawed at him during the night suddenly became clear under Magdelene’s expectant gaze. He had asked himself over and over that if Goldbow really cared for this family, why hadn’t he reached out for help from the Ash Angels? He could have done so discreetly many times.
The answer was obvious. “We don’t know all the targets.”
Magdelene nodded her approval. “Why don’t we?”
It all came to Helo in a rush. “If she works and the boys go to school, there would be large chunks of the day where the family is outside the Dread surveillance in the neighborhood. Goldbow would know this. There has to be a Dread or two out there who floats around and watches them when they are away from home.”
“And not only that,” Magdelene added, “if the Dreads are in contact with each other, if any one of them is taken out or doesn’t report in, they might put into play whatever plan they have to punish Goldbow. I don’t have to remind you of the airliner disasters to drive home the point that they are ruthless. The first mission today is to make perfectly sure we know all the targets and that no Ash Angel with an aura gets near them. If they see us coming, the Morse family will pay a horrible price.
“Corinth and I will head to school as children to watch the boys. Helo, you and Dolorem go to the convenience store to check up on Angelina. Your motorcycle-rider personas will work well there. Report at noon. Corinth and I are going to get dressed and morphed. Angelina reports to work at ten, so you guys show up a little after. We need to be quick but thorough, gentlemen. We’re on the clock, so let’s get this done.”
Magdelene and Corinth left while Helo and Dolorem waited, Dolorem eating his weight in sausage, egg, and bacon muffins. Helo kept going back to Corinth’s question: If Goldbow had done such terrible things, why hadn’t his aura turned? The Ash Angels seemed to count on the fact that any traitor to the AAO would immediately manifest a change of aura, Blanks excepted.
Clearly, actions alone did not determine the color of one’s aura. But the answer lay in the first rule of any mission: make sure normals came to no harm. The reason they were all Ash Angels in the first place was because they were willing to sacrifice to save lives. Goldbow was still saving lives: the lives of his mortal family. If the protection of normals ranked highest in the pantheon of Ash Angel priorities, then Goldbow’s heart was still in the right place.
As for double dealing on Cassandra, that he couldn’t wrestle to a redeeming conclusion. Yes, Goldbow had trapped himself between a family he should have left behind and a love he wanted to embrace, but to latch on to Cassandra when he hadn’t let go of his wife was despicable. His infidelity to both women would cost him everything—his family, his Ash Angel love, and his freedom. Worse, it would drive Cassandra into a fit of rage and sorrow that might turn her into the Dread so many already thought she was.
As ten o’clock neared, they left the Winchester McDonald’s, th
eir phones guiding them back to Lexington and the Scratch and Gulp Convenience store where Angelina worked. The morning had started to clear but gradually grayed over again with sprinting, low clouds. They were in for a cold, late winter rain.
The brown plaster convenience store slumped in the gathering gloom, dingy with advertisements for lottery tickets and oversized posters of soft drinks plastered on the windows and doors. Oil and soda stains mottled the asphalt, and gas fumes clung to the dirty, dented gas terminals. They filled their tanks, Angelina’s Corolla catching Helo’s eye from the side lot.
“She’s here,” he said.
Dolorem nodded and replaced the pump. “Let’s get inside. This looks like a one-stop shop for financial and bladder problems. Should be fun.”
A bell jangled loudly as Helo pulled open the door. Dolorem immediately crossed to the soda machine to fill the mammoth forty-eight-ounce bladder buster bucket to the brim with dark, carbonated goodness for only $1.99, as advertised. Helo joined a line six deep that stretched into a row filled with inviting candy packages.
A tired but friendly Angelina worked alone, serving the queue as quickly as she could. Helo grabbed a king-sized Snickers bar while Dolorem collected a veritable cornucopia of candy, carrying the bucket of soda balanced in the other arm.
“How much did you weigh, um, before?” Helo asked, amazed at the man’s appetite.
“I was actually pretty thin,” Dolorem said. “Well, until I worked in a convenience store a lot like this. Hard to resist all that soda and bright packaging. It’s not fair, really. They do all this research to figure out subliminal ways of making you want to buy stuff. Works on me, that’s for sure. You’re only buying one?”
