by Ann Angel
My hand tightens on the doorknob as I consider following them anyway. But Kieren could scent me out, and in corporeal form, there’s something both icky and stalkery about watching over an adolescent assignment without her knowledge. Even more so if she’s engaging in sexy-fun time.
Besides, like every other souled being on the planet, Kieren has a GA of his own. It’s not as if they’ve been abandoned by heaven, and besides, table nine is waiting on its three little javelina chops and spit-roasted white-winged dove.
It’s almost three a.m. when I exit via that same door, with every intention of sleeping past noon. I’m still wearing the black wings. After this weekend, I’ll donate them to Sanguini’s costume closet, but right now I’m reluctant to take them off. Even though they’re fakes, they make me feel more like myself.
At the far end of the parking lot, someone’s standing in front of a truck, hood up, peering inside like there’s some kind of problem. I jog over to see if I can offer any assistance and discover that it’s Jamal.
“Do you need a jump?” I ask, like I know anything about motor vehicles. But there are still a dozen cars parked in the lot. I could fetch somebody to help him out.
“It’s not the battery,” he replies, sliding into the driver’s seat. The engine chugs, spurts, and stops. “Oh.” Glancing at the dash, he grins, embarrassed. “I ran out of gas again. You’d think I’d have learned by now to check that first.” Jamal yawns. “I’m fried. I’ll mess with it tomorrow.”
Jamal gets out, shuts the door, and locks it. “I might be able to make the last Capital Metro bus . . .” He checks the time on his light-up digital watch. “Or not.”
“How about I give you a ride home?” I say, gesturing toward my enormous black SUV.
He grins, eyeing my wings. “What are you, my guardian angel?”
I fight to not show a reaction. “You think I’m yours?” I reply, flirting again, but I’m not (entirely) lying by omission.
“Sounds great, thanks,” he says. “But only if you let me take you out to dinner on Sunday.”
Sanguini’s is closed on Sundays. I should stay home and provide Quincie with moral support and porcine-blood Popsicles while she writes her essay on Beowulf. But Jamal looks vulnerable and adorable, and what if he’s never asked out a guy before? Cupid has me in his sights. “It’s a date.”
Come morning, Quincie yanks out another of the dozen white crosses that have been driven into the land roped off for Chef Nora’s garden. Quincie is wholly souled, so religious symbols have zero negative effect on her physical well-being, but the display has jostled her emotionally. Quincie would rather a personal attack on herself than on her loved ones or Sanguini’s.
I wander toward the front of the restaurant and call over my shoulder, “The window in the front door was broken, too.” It’ll be replaced by the time we reopen at sunset. But we’re talking vandalism, not just a practical joke or fan tribute to the theme. Not just a few NCPH losers out to make a little noise. “Nora was the last to leave, at three thirty,” I add. “She didn’t see anything, but there was that incident in the foyer last night. Do you want me to call Detective Zaleski?”
“Over random crazy people, religious yard art, and a little broken glass?” Quincie pulls out the last stake and tosses it into the wheelbarrow. “Not exactly an apocalypse-level emergency. We don’t even know if they’re all connected.” Looping her hand into the crook of my arm, she grins up at me. “Now, what’s this I hear about your giving Jamal a ride home last night?”
It’s Sunday evening, and I’m having the time of my eternal life. Jamal brought me to Rack, Rock ’N’ Bowl, a twenty-four-hour karaoke-bowling-billiards restaurant, and we’re seated at a two-top bar table overlooking the bowling lanes. I wore my favorite belt buckle for the occasion. It reads, HEAVENLY. “Want to split an appetizer?”
“Nothing Italian,” Jamal says. “Nothing with goth overtones . . . Something so average it hurts.”
We could both use a break from Sanguini’s. “Cheese fries?” I suggest. “Buffalo wings?”
He leans in as if about to unveil the secrets of the universe. “Chicken quesadillas.”
How gloriously banal!
I’d been worried that the date — my first date ever — would be awkward, but no. We can’t say enough to each other. Jamal’s been telling me about how, when he was eight years old, a weredolphin saved him from drowning during a family vacation on the Gulf Coast. He continues, “After graduation, I’m going to get a law degree and specialize in shape-shifter rights. You know . . . if I can scrape the money together. It’s getting tougher and tougher to score financial aid.”
I make a mental note to talk to Quincie, whose inheritances go well beyond the restaurant, about instituting academic scholarships for Sanguini’s employees, maybe even one earmarked for shifter-related advocacy studies. It’s an open secret that she’s happy to employ the feathered and furred, though I’m one of the few who know who’re the Bears, Deer, and Wild Card mixes (we’ve got a Lion-Possum dishwasher) on staff. I lean back in my chair. “To see like a Cat, glide like an Eagle, smell like a Bear, the ways shifters are different from humans, they’re not curses, they’re . . . blessings.”
Jamal scowls at me. “Yeah, well, a lot of people into heaven” — he makes air quotes around the word — “don’t see it that way, when it comes to species or a whole lot of other stuff. Like . . . us.”
Like two devastatingly adorable black guys on a date at a bowling alley? Yeah, some people would have a problem with us on one or more levels. That doesn’t mean they get to win.
“So you’ll be splitting the chicken quesadillas?” a familiar voice asks.
Crap. It’s my new supervisor, the recently promoted archangel Zachary, playing waiter. He may be prettier than I am, depending on how your taste runs, and Jamal is looking at him as if he’s — and he is — divine. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” Jamal asks. “Wait, you’re Zachary!”
Oops. Zachary likewise worked undercover at Sanguini’s while watching over Quincie. Of course Jamal recognizes him. “Yeah,” Zachary replies, blinking like he hadn’t thought it through. “Uh, I really miss that place.”
Jamal and I agree to the appetizer and order root beers, and then I excuse myself to go to the little-boys’ room. We’ve done this before, Zachary and I, meeting to talk freely in mortal territory. Men’s rooms are usually the most convenient choice. Something’s wrong. Zachary’s blown his cover before, but never that carelessly.
I’m washing my hands when I catch sight of him materializing in the mirror behind me, still in his waiter disguise. “Dude!” I exclaim. “How’s everything upstairs? Do the warhorses miss me? I —”
“You have abandoned your assignment,” Zachary intones. “Your WSV-1a form is forty-eight hours late, and you are putting earthly pleasures above your holy duty to —”
“In other words,” I say, raising my chin, “I’m following your example.”
I shouldn’t have to remind him that I’m slipped because I showed myself publicly in order to point Quincie in the right direction after he abandoned her at the request of his ascended-soul girlfriend (now fiancée), Miranda. Whether he now outranks me or not, neither of us is in a position to get all sanctimonious with the other.
Besides, he’s all about romantic love.
Crossing my arms, I say, “You know full well how strong willed she is. If I crowd Quincie, she’ll rebel. I have to respect her privacy when it comes to —”
“Respect this,” Zachary counters, flashing from black pants, shoes, and a button-down white oxford to flowing robes, gladiator sandals, and luminous majestic wings. Show-off.
He explains, “Sanguini’s is under attack. Quincie was doing homework in the break room when a bunch of deluded SOBs with baseball bats charged in through the back door and —”
“What?” I exclaim. If anything could jeopardize my assignment’s soul, it would have to be an attack on either her boyfriend or her fami
ly restaurant. “They broke down a steel door? How the hell —?”
“Hell is right. You were so busy talking to Quincie about boys on Friday afternoon that you, an angel of the order guardian, failed to notice the hell-spawn demon dancing through the dining room!”
Where demons dance, trouble follows.
Jamal doesn’t ask any questions when I announce that thugs have broken into the restaurant and Quincie’s there alone. He tosses cash onto the table and nearly beats me out the door.
I’m in no mood to talk. Jamal cranks the Screaming Head Colds’ new song, hits eighty-five miles per hour on MoPac Expressway, and runs two red lights between the Fifth Street exit and South Congress.
When his pickup squeals from the alley into Sanguini’s parking lot, Detective Zaleski — a werebear himself — is tossing the belligerent loudmouth I recognize from the foyer on Friday, now in cuffs, into the back of an unmarked van. Peering in, I see that he’s one of a half-dozen prisoners. Zaleski’s partner, Wertheimer (a Porcupine-Rabbit), is at the wheel.
“Where is she?” I want to know. “Quincie, where —?”
“Inside,” Wertheimer grunts, leaning out the driver’s-side window. “Tough kid. Really tough kid.”
Zaleski addresses Jamal. “Were you working the night of the disturbance in the lobby?”
“Yes, sir,” Jamal replies, and I take advantage of the opportunity to rush to my assignment.
“Quincie!” The door, the lock, doesn’t show any damage. But inside, the hallway has been spray-painted with the words Rot in Hell! “Where are you?”
Glancing into the commercial kitchen, I register the mayhem, the shattered dishes and dented counters, the food jars broken on the stained concrete floor. “Quincie!”
“Joshua!” is the answering call. “In here!”
The barware is trashed. Chandelier crystals litter the midnight-blue carpeting. The faux-painted “castle” rock walls are scarred with more hateful messages and threats. It’s not clear if the attack was motivated by Sanguini’s shifter-friendly rep or the all-in-fun vampire theme. Both, I suspect.
One is real, the other just pretend, but — regardless — there’s no excuse for this chaos.
Standing in the middle of the dining room, Quincie stares at the blood on her hands, and my breath catches. She didn’t kill anyone, did she?
Quincie glances up at my approach. “It’s not what you think. I cut myself on one of the smashed Cupid centerpieces.” I feel awful that she could read the doubt on my face. “I was going to pack them up this afternoon anyway,” she adds, like that’s the point.
“I’m so sorry I wasn’t here for you.” I pull her into a hug. “At least the cops came fast.”
“Anonymous call,” she replies as Jamal walks in, carrying the first-aid kit from the kitchen. “Somebody must’ve seen them coming.” Anonymous, my sweet booty. The archangel Zachary did some damage control on the situation.
The thing about hell-spawn demons is that the minor leaguers can’t take alternate forms. Even in proudly weird Austin, it’s not hard for me to track down a guy with a tail and horns.
“You stole the key to Sanguini’s back door,” I whisper, holding the jerk by his blue velvet lapels in the underground parking lot of a Whole Foods. He goes by Duane, and he smells like burnt toast. “You let those men in. You were trying to manipulate Quincie into losing her soul, and you failed. She’s too strong for you.” I frown, sure I’ve missed something, when it hits me. “Also, you’re totally fired. No last paycheck. Adios.”
I don’t love this battleground. A bunch of college kids in Greek-letter T-shirts are cruising past with bags of three-dollar wine. They don’t even double-take at his appearance. Also, I have zero battle skills. War is business best left to the archangels.
“Seriously, Joshua,” the demon replies. “What’s this new policy?”
“So long as there’s any soul left,” I reply, “we don’t surrender. No more freebies.”
He laughs out loud at that. “She’s undead. You angels are wasting your eternity watching over monsters. They’re not God’s children. They’re ours.”
The fact that he’s wrong doesn’t mean Duane isn’t going to kick my ass any minute now. I may have lost my superpowers, but his are firmly intact. The whites of his eyes turn to flame. He raises his hand, a ball of fire spinning in the palm, and I brace for the pain.
Light flashes, and on reflex I wince. But it’s Zachary, and he’s cut down Duane with his glowing Sword of Heaven . . . because archangels are cooler than guardians and wield weapons like that.
Zachary’s appearance causes a VW Beetle to crash into a Smart car, an elderly woman to check out his ass, a baby to start crying, a baby to start giggling, and a giant burn mark to mar the cement wall.
“You’re right,” Zachary admits. “I am a total hypocrite. Sorry I yelled at you.”
I accept his apology, but I’m the worst earthbound angel ever. He’s bailed me out twice. It’s time to rededicate myself to the mission. I’m an angel of the order guardian. I know better what my teenage assignment needs than she knows herself. My mission is to protect her, and that means total focus. From this moment on, I am the job.
Jamal will end up somebody else’s boyfriend.
It’s another Friday night at Sanguini’s. The news story on what was described as “vandalism” here amounted to little more than a footnote in the local media.
A slender hand lands on my shoulder. Quincie says, “I’ll babysit your tables while you go dance.”
“What’re you talking about? Table nine ordered the linguini l’autumno, and I forgot to tell Chef Nora there’s a gluten issue —”
“I’ll tell Nora.” Flexing her preternatural strength, Quincie turns my body so I can see Jamal waiting on the dance floor, his hands clasped in front of him, holding a single long-stemmed red rose. He’s wearing my faux black wings from Valentine’s Day weekend. On cue, Sinatra begins singing “Cheek to Cheek” over the speakers. It’s sweet, romantic, and pointless.
“Look, I tried, remember? Jamal can never know the real me, and besides, my duty is —”
“Blah, blah, blah,” Quincie interrupts. “Depression doesn’t work for you, Joshua. You’re the most upbeat, excitable being I’ve ever met. You’ll get the hang of this whole secret-identity thing.”
“But —”
“You can’t spend eternity beating yourself up because one demon sneaked by,” she insists. “Sneakiness is a demon thing, I grant you. But we can outsmart them. For starters, whether you’re in angel mode or waiter-gossip mode, all visible horns and tails must be faux only. Unless we’re talking about a wereram or something. If necessary, we’ll check. There’s one problem solved.”
“But —”
“Besides, it’s not like the archangel Michael never bailed out Zachary back in his GA days.”
“But —”
“I’m right here, the dance floor is right there, and, so help me, Joshua, the real you shines through in everything you do. Just because you haven’t admitted it in so many words and don’t glow right now doesn’t mean that Jamal can’t, on some level, sense you’re an angel. He clearly wants you. Or at least he wants to find out if he wants you.”
I step forward, hesitate. “He doesn’t believe in heaven. He faults faith for —”
“An angel may encourage, may inspire, may nudge, but each soul ultimately chooses its own fate. Choose.” Quincie grins up at me. “It’s a dance, Joshua. Not a mission from on high. Get out there.”
Who knows how things will turn out with Jamal, but at least I’ve got a new best friend in Quincie. I’ve witnessed the blessings of romantic love, but I know it’s friendships that sustain us when all else fails. I give her forehead a quick kiss. “Sometimes I wonder who’s watching over who.”
“Whom,” she replies, swatting my booty.
At least her English grade is secure. “You bucking for wings of your own?”
“Call me Cupid,” she replie
s.
Mr. P. was new that year. He was short, almost chubby, with a young, pretty face. He walked back and forth across the front of the classroom with his hands in the pockets of his khakis when he talked to us about the Civil War, and he had this adorable way of brushing his hair out of his eyes. We senior girls thought he was cute. We giggled when he walked by in our private-school hallways, and he looked at us and said, “What?” with a huge smile. We could tell he loved it. He was too short and heavy to have competed with the other guys in college, probably got laid here and there, but not with the hot girls. So this was exciting for him, being the new, young, cute teacher about whom all the girls whispered.
Some weeknights, my friends and I dressed up in short skirts and heels and went into the city to bars. This was before the city cracked down on underage drinking, when the bouncers smirked at our fake IDs but then waved us in. We went with the sole purpose of picking up boys. Usually we wound up sitting by ourselves, our drinks sweating on the table. We smoked cigarette after cigarette, just waiting to be chosen by the boys who came through the bar. Sometimes we got lucky. Only sometimes. There was no rhyme or reason to when. But I learned that year in my psychology senior elective that this sort of partial reinforcement was the kind that kept girls like me roped in. It kept me coming back again and again for more, like someone who keeps pulling the lever of a slot machine, dropping hundreds of dollars in coins, because twenty-three pulls ago she won ten bucks in quarters.
Every once in a while, it happened, though. Every now and then, a boy locked eyes with me and my heart sped. I sat taller in my chair; I cocked my head and smiled. Everything else went away, my mind — my whole body — a sharpened arrow pointing toward that thing I wanted. It was just that boy and me, and the promise that he would prove I was everything I wanted to be: beautiful, desirable, worthwhile, real. Those nights we got lucky, we didn’t make it back into New Jersey until two or three, sometimes even four, in the morning. We’d be late for school, and I’d fall asleep in Mr. Reardon’s calculus class, waking with my cheek stuck to my textbook from drool. It was as though we had two lives — the one in the city, where there were lights and glamour and possibility, and the one during the day, where we squeaked by with Bs and B minuses, where we were average. Anyway, Mr. Reardon never seemed to care. But I also fell asleep sometimes in Mrs. Jefferson’s English class, and she wasn’t so forgiving. My punishment was to stay after school to help her photocopy poetry handouts for our class. And this is how things happened with Mr. P.
