Aggie chewed her bottom lip, which was very kissable, and oh so impossible to touch in the way that Charlie wanted. Trying to ignore her mouth, he said, “When I was a still child—or at least, a child as my people define it—I was sent into the city. Gargoyles need to learn integration at a young age. We’re naturally solitary, but forcing ourselves into areas of high population enables us to suppress the urge to hide. It’s better that way. In the city, people don’t notice if you’re a little…strange. It’s free anonymity.”
“Free loneliness, too.”
“You know what it’s like to have secrets, Agatha. Sometimes what you try to hide takes over your life. It becomes your life. Or in my case, it was my life, from the day I was born.”
“Was?”
“Finding Emma shook things up. Changed my priorities. Or maybe just reawakened my true nature.”
“Which was what?”
He wanted to smile. “Protecting others.”
“You say that like it’s something funny.”
“Because it is, in a way. I never used to think about what I could do for others. Not really. I was too caught up in staying anonymous.”
“Helping people is dangerous,” Aggie agreed. “For anyone, it’s dangerous. You open yourself up, physically and mentally.”
“I suppose. I don’t regret it, though. Not at all.”
“You can’t be faulted for nobility.”
“Just as long as it doesn’t expose us. Something I think you understand.”
Aggie smiled. “It’s the Dirk & Steele creed: Help others, no matter what, and keep the secret safe. All because it’s a big bad world, and we’re just too different to be left alone if anyone should find out the truth.”
“How did they find you?”
“Don’t you already know?”
Money, he thought, but said, “I like to hear you talk.”
“Awfully friendly all of a sudden, aren’t you?” Aggie had a sly glint in her eye.
“Something has come over me,” he admitted. “I’ve turned into a wild beast.”
A low laugh escaped her. “It was money. I was stupid and needed to pay for college. I thought I could play the lottery and get away with it. Problem is, I see multiple futures. The more time between the present and the future I’m trying to predict, the more variations there are, which meant I had to play the specific numbers almost minutes before they were announced. I won, too. Cashed in a cool million.”
“But some questioned it.”
“Yes. The investigating officials never could prove anything, but it got my name in the papers. About a week after that, I received a call from Roland.” She shook her head. “I thought the man was on crack, but he knew things…things about me he couldn’t, and then once he introduced me to the others and showed what they were all about…”
He saw her memories, shared her doubts and awe, and then, later, her love for all those people in her life who were friends, close as family.
“You’re happy with them,” he said, feeling wistful. He was close to his brothers, but not like this. Never like this.
“Happier than I ever imagined I could be. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t gotten hired. If I hadn’t been pointed in a direction that helps people.”
“You would still have done good,” Charlie guessed.
“I don’t know,” Aggie said. “Really, I don’t. Choices, Charlie. I would have made choices I’m not sure I would have been proud of down the line. The future allows for second chances, alternate paths, but once you fall into the present and the past, that’s it. No going back.”
It was not safe for Charlie to materialize, not with so many cars around, but he wished for at least the semblance of a physical form so that he could pretend to sit with her in this car, in the flesh. “My father once said that it’s our inability to change the past that helps us make better futures.”
“He’s an optimist.”
“Yeah, he was.”
Aggie frowned. Charles heard the question coming, but there was no time to listen to it, no time because his heart tugged and he had run out of death. He said, “Agatha, I have to go,” and for the first time he felt her own heart scatter toward him—her thoughts, her emotions, a trickle of something deep and powerful that Charlie was too afraid to call love but thought could be the beginning, the baby root, of some terrible wonderful affection. He held on to that feeling, to her heart, and he said, “I’ll be back.”
She said his name, but the car and her face and the world faded and he snapped back to the sandy floor in the middle of his prison. The witch stood above him. Her hair was a different color: burnished copper, framing milky skin. Green eyes this time, but still glittering, hard and cold. She did not have her knife.
“You’ve been playing me for a fool,” she said. “You sly creature. You’ve been running high while I cut you dead.”
Charlie tried to sit up, but the witch placed one small foot on his chest. Her strength was immense, impossible. He could not move her.
“No,” she whispered, as her white robes billowed in the windless room. “You will not be leaving here again for quite some time.”
“How did you find out?” he asked, because the game was up, and there did not seem to be much point in pretending otherwise. His brothers watched.
“It occurred to me that no one would want to die as much as you, simply for the peace of endless darkness. So I searched for your soul, and did not find it where I thought it should be. Instead, I discovered a very long and winding trail.” The witch traced his chest with her toe, curling her foot around his bone plates, the wiry silver lines of his corded muscles. “Very long, very windy. And I must say, you are peculiar. Saving a child from the darkness? Pleasuring strange women from beyond the grave?”
“You have to let me go back,” he said. “Please. Just let me help save the child. That’s all I ask.”
The witch shook her head. “The child is beyond saving. You don’t realize, do you? Her captors are not entirely human.”
Charlie grabbed her ankle and twisted. The witch danced backwards, smiling, hair glinting bright and hot. He scrabbled to his feet, stretching to his full height, wings arcing up and up, pulling on his tired, misused muscles. His claws dug into his palms and he said, “What do you mean, they’re not human?”
“Poor gargoyle,” she whispered, still smiling. “The blood of your kind must be growing thin to not recognize the scent of a demon.”
His breath caught. “Impossible. They’re gone.”
For a moment he sensed a shiver of fear inside the witch’s gaze. “Not all of them were shut behind the gate, my sweet. And those who remained…changed. They never left. They did as your kind did. Lived as human. Thinned their ranks. There are not many left, and they are weak now. So very weak. But a weak demon is still a demon, and you know how much they enjoy pain.” She shook her head. “That mother and her son don’t even realize what they are. All they have are urges, a desire for suffering. Depravity in its very worst form.”
“And they choose to listen to that desire,” Charlie said, feeling the echo of his conversation with Agatha ring dull inside his heart and head.
“They choose,” agreed the witch. “We all choose, one way or another.”
She passed backwards out of the circle drawn in the sand. Light flared around her feet and she said, “Be good, sweet Charlie. Dream of your little girl and your woman and your days in the sun. Dream of death.”
“No, please,” he cried, throwing himself after her. The line flared white hot, and he cried out, blind, clutching his burning face.
The witch said nothing, but he heard the tinkle of her laughter as she left the cavern and shut the thick door behind her.
Charlie slumped to the ground. After a time, the burning in his cheeks subsided. His eyesight returned. He stared at himself, at his immense body, all his wasted strength—all while Agatha journeyed alone to save the life of a child who was being held captive by the de
scendents of real evil. The old enemy still walked.
You lied when you told Agatha there was no such thing as a creature born wrong.
Maybe, though at the time he did not believe excluding demons was such a stretch of the truth.
If Mrs. Kreer and Andrew are part demon, they’re also part human. Don’t let the witch wrap you up with words. And don’t forget, too, that she could be lying.
Could be, might be. It didn’t matter. He was stuck here, with no way to help Agatha or Emma.
He thought of the little girl, waiting for him in the darkness; the comfort she had taken from not being alone. And his rage—his unadulterated rage at not being able to protect her from abuse and degradation.
He thought of Agatha, too, going there without his help. She would make do without him—he knew that. She would find some way in.
Charlie stood and looked at his brothers. “I have to help them.”
But the only way to leave was to die, and he had no weapons. Nothing but his own hands.
And his brothers’ bodies. The edges of their wings were sharp.
It took Charlie some time to muster up his resolve. It was not easy.
And when he began killing himself, it only got worse.
CHAPTER FIVE
The winding drive from Seattle to Darrington went much faster than Aggie anticipated, but she blamed Charlie for that, because all she could think of—between preparing for her pseudo Rambo-like rescue of Emma—was his voice, his warmth, his touch.
Funny, but it was his voice that lingered heaviest in her heart. The sex he had given her—if that was what it could be called—had been past good, more than extraordinary, utterly beyond Aggie’s scope of limited experience, given that she usually shut herself off before things could get too tight. Not enough trust, too much fear that her secrets would be discovered. But here, now? Her lack of inhibition was a total shock.
And yet, his voice. She missed his voice. She wanted desperately to talk with him, and not just because she needed to know more about the house Emma was being kept in, or the Kreers and their habits. She simply wished to hear him speak. To say anything.
You are so ridiculous, she chided herself. Big tough strong woman, taken down by a ghost with a magic touch and a hot, hot, voice.
Well, maybe she was being silly, but that didn’t matter. Aggie missed him. The son of a bitch was growing on her. She just hadn’t realized how much until his last disappearance. It bothered her, the way he left. It felt like it was against his will.
You don’t know anything about him. Not really. All you’re running on now is faith. Everything he’s told you this far could be lies.
Maybe, but she did not believe that. Call it gut instinct, call it whatever you liked, but she trusted him. God help her, she even liked him. Maybe liked him a little more than she should. Maybe, even, that “like” was something stronger. Stronger than lust, stronger than anything she had ever felt before.
Oh, how she wanted to hear his voice.
Seattle had grown up and spread out during the years since Aggie had last been there; the suburban sprawl along I-5 as she traveled north was unrelenting, and even visions of the Cascade range on her right did little to alleviate the gray and steel and glitter of encroachment. But then she left the freeway, left behind malls and cookie cutter developments, and wended her way high and higher into a world of rock and forests. Darrington sat at the base of Whitehorse Mountain, surrounded by enough hiking trails and parks to make an outdoors-type weep for joy. Aggie thought it was all very pretty, but she kept recalling Emma locked in darkness, Emma before the camera, Emma being touched, and she had to roll down her window for some air, which was crisp, full with the clean tangy scent of wild things. Sparkling and pure.
Maybe there are gargoyles hiding up here.
Maybe shape-shifters, too. Maybe a whole host of creatures out of legend. The world fairly teemed with mystery.
But still, she wondered. Would it be possible for a gargoyle—whatever that was, since Charlie still had given her no description at all, save for I’m not human—to live as himself in a place like this? Few people, lots of places to hide. At most, an urban legend, able to come and go. It sounded ideal to Aggie.
Then again, given what little Charlie had said to her, being away from people would probably miss the point. If a gargoyle’s true nature were one of protection, then the urge to be in areas where such a gift would be most necessary might be great indeed. Even if it was unconscious. Suppressed.
Her cell phone rang. It was Quinn.
“Roland got hold of me,” he said without preamble. “I guess this is what you were going to talk about last night when you called.”
“I told him not to get you involved,” Aggie said, exasperated. “You need a break.”
“So do you, Aggie. But you should have just come and told me. Better that than running off alone on some mission of mercy.”
“You were occupied,” she reminded him, “and besides, the circumstances are complicated. This isn’t just some whim I’m acting on.”
“It never is,” Quinn said, and Aggie wondered how much she should say. She knew for certain that Quinn could be trusted with Charlie’s secret, but that was not her call to make—not her secret, not her life. And frankly, she did not want the responsibility of being the one person to reveal the existence of a whole other race of supernatural beings—in addition to the ones currently sharing their office space at work. Though, really, if Charlie were fully aware of the existence of those golden-eyed shape-shifters, she wondered if the reverse were true—if Koni and Amiri and Rik knew all about gargoyles, and had simply never said a word.
That bothered her. It made her wonder if there wasn’t some kind of supernatural union or club, whose members all swore secrecy. No one talked about each other unless forced to, everyone pretended he was the only weird creature in the world, and that way the whole crowd stayed nice and anonymous and faceless.
“There’s a little girl in trouble,” she said to Quinn. “Her name is Emma, and her kidnappers killed her mother. More child porn. Could be they’re even part of the same ring. Their names are Kreer.”
“Sickos of the world unite,” Quinn said. “So, what’s your plan? Have you alerted the police yet?”
“There’s…been some indication that the police would be unwilling to go after these two, especially without hard evidence in hand. Apparently, the mother and son responsible for the abuse are…well-liked within the community.”
She heard his brief snort of laughter. “So basically, you’re going in there guns blazing to get the kid, and to hell with the Man.”
“Kind of.”
“You are so nuts, Aggie. If you don’t keep the evidence intact, if they get a chance to destroy anything—”
“I know,” she interrupted him. “I’ll be writing you letters from prison.”
“Oh, my heart. But don’t worry, Aggie. I’ll wait for you.”
“Thanks a lot.” Aggie saw a sign up ahead, DARRINGTON: 13 MILES.
“I’m almost there,” she told him. “Any words of advice?”
“There’s a small airport on the edge of town. It’s called Gold Hill. You should go there first.”
“Uh, yeah?”
“Yeah. I’ll be waiting for you.”
And he hung up the phone.
Quinn cut a very sleek and tiny figure at the edge of Darrington’s municipal airport. Leather jacket, jeans, big silver belt buckle. He was not alone, which surprised Aggie. Amiri was with him, standing tall and lean and graceful, dark skin glowing with rich undertones. His short black hair was streaked blond. He wore a simple buttoned shirt and narrow fitting slacks. His eyes were golden. Like a cat.
Both men stood in the sun, just outside a very old and dusty café that had no sign or name, but which clearly served some kind of food. The tables outside were filled with men, as were the tables inside, pressed against the windows. Coffee and sandwiches, Aggie saw when she pulled up. Futures fa
nned before her; a chaotic dance of warm homes and arguments and television. She did not single anyone out. She did not want to know. All the men who had been staring at Quinn and Amiri suddenly turned their attention to her.
Ah, scrutiny. The blessing of being different. And a stranger.
“Maybe if we pretend we’re circus performers they’ll crack a smile,” Aggie said, as both men climbed into her car. Quinn took the passenger seat; Amiri slid easily into the back. Both their immediate futures were simple, stable: no bullets or blood.
“I don’t know,” Quinn said, glancing back at the unblinking stony faces still watching them. “I don’t think the circus would do all that well up here. I think the clowns might be too much of a shock.”
“Speaking of shocks,” Aggie said, and Quinn shrugged.
“Why fly commercial when Roland is willing to spring for a private jet? The plane is still here, by the way. I hope you didn’t get a round-trip ticket.”
“How the hell did he know I was going to Darrington?”
“You bought the ticket with the agency credit card, and the rental car company wrote down your destination for their mileage calculation. You figure it out.”
“I was begging for an intervention, wasn’t I?”
“Oh, yeah. Big time.”
Aggie looked over her shoulder at Amiri, who was, as usual, quiet. “Hey,” she said. “How did you get roped into this?”
A small smile touched his mouth. “You mean, how did someone as new as myself become assigned to a task of such importance? I am, as Roland has said, green. But practice makes perfect.” His accent was buttery, pure Kenyan.
“I asked for him,” Quinn said. “Having a shape-shifter around might come in handy.”
“Oh, right. Because cheetahs are native to the forests of Washington.”
“Who is to say they are not?” Amiri asked. Golden light momentarily spilled from his eyes, curling down his cheeks, which fuzzed with spotted fur before quickly receding into smooth skin. His smile widened. His teeth were sharp.
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