She bit her lower lip. “It’s the way things were. Luckily, she loved me with all her heart. I became a nun because I had no chance for a good marriage. I also learned at an early age that I had to stick up for myself. Anyway, late in my life, Europe’s head angel got to know me, don’t ask me how, and offered me a position as peacemaker. God bless him.”
“Amen,” I replied.
Her dimpled smile cheered me up.
“I worked for him for a couple of centuries until Honah put out a request for guardian angels in North America. I preferred fighting to peacemaking anyway, and so I came here. He’s been a great inspiration.”
That was comforting to hear. So much of my immortal life depended on him. “I’m so glad it worked out for you. After such a rough start, you deserved a break.”
She didn’t respond, except a quick nod before she turned away.
We finished the laundry, and while I was waiting to be sent to the spa, we relaxed. She didn’t seem annoyed with me, despite my best accidental efforts to poke at her, so I asked. “Do angels get personal time to get to know others?”
She gave me a sly grin. “Of course. We all need time to unwind now and then. What do you have in mind, sir?”
Nothing more complicated than a chance to get to know her better. “Would you like to do something with me, like maybe go to a blues bar? Just so we can get to know one another?”
She looked me up and down as though seeing me for the first time. “Why not? It sounds like fun, and I’m sure I can handle you if you become too annoying. Tell Honah, and he’ll fit it into our schedules.”
A warm glow filled me. I hadn’t had a relationship with a woman since I’d left Boise to help Ellen with the ranch. “I sure will, thanks.”
We chatted about different kinds of music until Honah sent her to a fire started by demons just south of the city.
As I sat alone, I wondered about asking Honah for permission to set up an animal rescue tent like I’d managed during the big fires in Colorado, but then I remembered Ellen. Most of my past rescue work took place in the day, and that’s when my sister needed me the most. I’d have to put off any rescue work until after Ellen was capable of handling the ranch on her own for a few days at a time. That probably wouldn’t be for months.
Instead of worrying about that, I turned to a much more pressing problem. How to handle Ophelia’s spa party.
Chapter 7
A FEW MINUTES before the party was due to start, Cleo stepped from the rooftop patio into the legion’s headquarters.
“Inga says you asked her on a date.”
So much for the usual small talk. I hoped I hadn’t annoyed her. “It seemed like a good idea. She’s a very nice person.”
Cleo patted my cheek. “She is, and a great friend. Treat her well, or you’ll have to answer to me.”
I should’ve expected that. If some guy were to take an interest in Ellen, I’d watch him like a hawk. “Fair enough. In the meantime, what do you think we need to find out while we’re at the spa? I’m most interested in locating Caligula. Then one of the guardians can take him out.”
She nodded. “So you know, Honah decided to eliminate him months ago, but we can’t find him.”
A moment later, Honah dropped her and me into the lobby of a fancy hotel. The entrance to its spa was fifty feet away. The door was open, and New Age music wafted out. We walked to the entrance, and I became a pure spirit. Cleo had the power to make herself invisible to humans, so she stood next to me and waited for Ophelia to show up.
Here come eight women, Cleo told me. When I say now, you should merge with the closest one. Hopefully, it’ll be Ophelia.
I waited and sensed several sentient beings approaching.
Now, Cleo told me.
I slipped into the mind of a human. She wasn’t Ophelia, but she stood next to her. Ophelia was a pretty, very tall woman with fair skin and blonde hair. She was broad-shouldered and muscular, which probably attracted Caligula. She’d make good breeding stock for monsters.
I switched into her mind. That’s when I learned he had enslaved her with the idea of creating an immortal heir. And she wasn’t the least bit happy about his success.
The woman was smiling at her friends and hid her anger deep inside. Her owner had combined the spirits of the three dead devils to create one fearsome beast. Worse, she was expected to raise this foul creature, one terrible enough to hang onto Caligula’s position after his death.
I pondered her awful future until the spa hostess invited everyone to drink champagne and eat caviar. In the background, light jazz played. The air was subtly scented with lilies, a fragrance I’d loved all my life. Lilies had been my mom’s favorite flower.
Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves, except for the party girl. I could understand that completely. I’d seen plenty of terrible things in my first few months as an angel, but Ophelia was in a worse fix than anyone I could remember. It was bad enough that she had to raise Caligula’s disgusting spawn, but he could read her mind so he’d know if she did anything to hurt it.
I sympathized, my heart ached for her, but there wasn’t much I could do to help except get rid of her master. To that end, I checked her memory to find out where Caligula lived and worked.
To my surprise, she didn’t know. He lived and worked in a place everyone called the tower, but she had no idea where it was. The windows in the vehicles that took her places allowed no light through. She’d even asked her driver where they lived, but he’d claimed he was sworn to secrecy.
The only advantage to being pregnant was that Caligula, and everyone around him, treated her like a queen. She wore a five-carat diamond pendant he’d just given her. She could eat anything she wanted, and her credit card had a fifty-thousand-dollar credit limit. She could have basically anything, except her freedom or another man. To make sure she wasn’t tempted in either direction, two goblins in human form followed her everywhere.
I relayed what I’d learned to my partner.
What a horrible deal, she said.
Amen to that.
Ophelia pretended to her friends, most of which were other slaves in Caligula’s harem, she was thrilled with being pregnant. But if she got the chance to bolt she’d take it in a heartbeat. Her owner had to know, and she expected he’d keep an even closer watch on her in the future.
Best of all, she didn’t have to sleep with the pig again until after her baby was born, and probably not even then. He brutalized women, and he didn’t want to take a chance of hurting his seed. Her soul purpose in life from then on was to be the best possible mother to a monster.
My skin crawled at the thought of how she’d live out her days, hating her own child and his father.
To find Caligula, I memorized all the details she knew about the tower, but her memories were confined to the inside. The building had twelve stories, and she could see taller towers around it, but none of them were distinct. Through one window, she did have a view of the Oakland Bay Bridge and Yerba Buena Island. With luck, that would be enough to find her prison.
The spa had lined up thirteen treatment tables next to each other, each equipped with a masseuse. The hostess invited each of the women to undress and lie down. Ophelia took one of the middle tables so she could be surrounded by her friends. Her masseuse had a quiet and soothing Southern drawl, and she began to rub oil over Ophelia’s body.
I enjoyed the experience as much as she did, letting my mind wander back to one of the satyrs at Claim Jumper. He’d talked about going to the tower, but he hadn’t seen it from the outside either. Who else would know?
A moment later, the answer came to me. The driver of the vehicle which brought her here. I needed to merge with his mind the next chance I got.
In the meantime, I needed to be patient. The massage helped. I’d never received one before, and I’d really missed out. The woman’s hands were soft, and her magical fingers soothed Ophelia’s tense muscles. This was
almost as good as sex.
The women chatted back and forth excitedly, but Ophelia mostly listened. Every time her masseuse touched her stomach, she flinched. If something bad happened to the spawn, she and everyone else nearby was sure to be tortured to death.
Try as I might, I couldn’t figure out a way of using Ophelia’s information to pinpoint the location of the tower. Based on general geography, it had to be somewhere on the southwest side of the city, but that included a lot of territory.
As a last-ditch effort, I checked her mind for public hangouts where I might find Caligula. But he didn’t go out much, at least not with her. Maybe he knew he was on Honah’s most-wanted list and needed to lay low. She didn’t even know the name of the restaurant where she’d met Andre the day before.
The masseuse continued to run her magical hands over Ophelia’s body, and the new mother slowly relaxed. She was safe for the moment, and as long as the spawn survived, her master would pamper and protect her. All she had to do in return was to raise a monster as terrible as he was. Her throat tightened, and tears welled in her eyes.
I switched into the head of the masseuse. She was worried sick about the tenseness in Ophelia’s body. She knew Ophelia belonged to some mobster, and he wanted her taken care of. The masseuse racked her brain to figure out how to coax the woman into relaxing. On a whim, the masseuse whispered a lullaby in Ophelia’s ear that her two-year-old son adored. That distracted Ophelia enough to where she forgot her troubles for a few minutes.
Cleo was inside the head of one of the friends nearby, so I asked her, Have you learned anything interesting?
Yes, actually. One of these women is the girlfriend of the cameraman who recorded the Avenger video. He saw Caligula Giovanni change shape to become Avenger. After the filming, he cast the deadly spells against the three devils. There’s no doubt who destroyed them.
I wasn’t going to mourn the three, that was for sure. Does he know why Caligula annihilated them? I asked. I had my theory, but I needed confirmation.
She doesn’t. Maybe he does. I can check on him tomorrow.
Another idea occurred to me. He might also know where the tower is.
When one of the women complained about a bruise their master had given her, Ophelia tensed up again. The masseuse decided she needed more than soft music to distract her.
The masseuse changed the soundtrack to a sultrier, sassier version of jazz and let her fingers slide lower on Ophelia’s torso. Just testing for a response, the masseuse lightly stoked the area below her belly button.
Ophelia sighed. The magic fingers strayed lower, and the young mother rocked her hips forward, enjoying the experience. The masseuse imagined a big tip and kissed her patient on the neck. A wet, sloppy kiss. Ophelia’s lips found hers and pressed hungrily.
The masseuse was quickly getting turned on. Then I remembered what the Earth’s head angel, Milton, had told me. There was a total prohibition on angels having sex with humans. Just to be sure I didn’t cross that not-so-clear line, I switched into the head of one of the masseuses next to us who’d continued with a normal massage.
Several of Ophelia’s friends teased her about how loud she was moaning, but that didn’t inhibit her a bit. Ophelia must’ve been desperate for affection. Maybe she realized this was the only sex she’d get anytime soon. Whatever the reason, she flopped around on the table and screamed like she was having the orgasm of her life.
When half of the other women followed her example, I found it particularly weird and couldn't relax until they all calmed down again.
Then I went back to trying to find Caligula. None of the women present knew any more about his whereabouts than Ophelia. The smart move seemed to be to follow them back to his tower.
An hour later, after various skin treatments, the spa session ended. The two goons outside herded the women into a huge limousine parked in front of the hotel. Neither of them knew their way back, and the driver stayed in the front of the limo, too far from me to merge with his mind. Instead, I shifted back into Ophelia’s head and I realized she had no intention of going home. Sure enough, through an intercom, she told the driver to take them to a bar near Fisherman’s Wharf.
-o-o-o-
Friday, August 11th
THE BAND PLAYED deafening hip hop, and most of the ladies got smashed, but not the party girl. She was too scared of hurting her owner’s spawn to be drinking any alcohol at all.
Cleo and I waited until the women finally decided they couldn’t stay awake any longer. But instead of heading home, Ophelia told the driver to take them to another hotel where they rented two large suites and crashed for the night. He left. I wanted to split up with Cleo and follow him while she stayed with the women, but she refused to let me go off alone.
That was annoying, but I didn’t want her to have to explain to the powers that be how I’d gotten myself destroyed because I insisted on splitting up. So, I stayed at the hotel in case the women decided to return to the tower early.
In the lobby, Cleo and I compared notes. “It doesn’t seem like we got much out of these women,” I said, “which is a damned shame given all the time we spent with them.”
“Truer words were never spoken,” she said with a sigh. “I can check on the cameraman later this morning, but you might as well go home.”
“I’ll be back before dark, and we should search the southwest part of the city for the view of the Oakland Bay Bridge I saw in Ophelia’s memory. There can’t be that many twelve story buildings with that perspective.”
-o-o-o-
BY THE TIME I returned to San Francisco late in the afternoon, I was eager to look for the tower. Kiko and I flew in our bird forms over the southwest part of the city. She was an osprey, a large hawk that typically hung around rivers and the sea.
It didn’t take long for us to figure out that hundreds of buildings enjoyed the view of the bridge I saw in Ophelia’s memory. Most didn’t have twelve stories, but the only way to find those that did was to visit every moderately tall building in the area.
We tried that, but most of them weren’t accessible to the public. I waited in my pure spirit form around the entrance of one place, hoping that someone with access would show up, but it seemed to take ages.
When a couple did arrive, I merged into the mind of the closest person. He turned out to be a stout middle-aged man. He was pissed at the younger, smaller blonde with him.
“I told you, Jim, I’m not going up to your apartment. Here’s where we say goodnight.”
Fury built inside him. “You led me on. Dinner and those fancy drinks cost me over a hundred bucks. Now I’m not good enough for you?”
“That’s right,” she fired back. “You’re a pig. You pretended to be nice, but all you want is to get into my pants.”
That caught Jim short. Of course, he was planning to blast off inside her, why else be nice? He grabbed her hand to lead her into his building.
This guy was way too aggressive. If he didn’t watch out, she’d never answer his phone calls again.
Before he knew what was happening, she yanked free.
“Bitch!” He grabbed her by the elbow and punched in the access code to open the lobby door. She didn’t resist as he pulled her inside. Jim thought she was playing hard to get, but liquor had clouded his mind. He was getting damned close to a battery charge.
Watch out, Gabriel, Kiko told me. We can’t punish human misconduct.
I know that, but we might have to stop a crime.
When one of the elevators opened, he pulled her toward it. This time, the blonde did resist. He pulled harder.
She slapped him with her free hand. “You’re really pissing me off, Jim! Good night.”
“You’re crazy if you think I’m letting you just walk out of here!” He reared back with his right fist to punch her.
Jesus, he’s nuts! Thinking fast, I materialized as my normal self—right between them. His fist caught me on my right cheekbone
. Dang. That really hurt. This guy was much stronger than he looked.
“Owww!” He held his fist with his left hand.
The woman saw her chance and bolted. “Don’t call me again, asshole!”
He turned to me. “Who the hell are you?”
“The guy who kept you from being charged with rape, idiot,” I said.
Kiko told me, Get out of there before you get into more trouble, Gabriel.
Me? Why am I trouble? He clobbered me. But I did as she’d suggested, left the lobby and strode down the street.
Jim didn’t follow.
Kiko appeared in her human form next to me. “You injured a human, broke several bones in his hand. That’s going to cause you considerable difficulty. You may even be suspended. I have to report this incident.”
“You were outside the building, so couldn’t see them. He tried to punch her. I couldn’t let him do that. My face kept his fist from smashing hers. He’s really strong.”
Kiko stared at me with narrowed eyes. “Honah will see exactly what happened through your memory. It does you no good to argue with me.”
That was probably true, but I didn’t want her to think I’d tried to hurt the guy.
She didn’t share with me the message she sent to the boss, but then she said, “I’ve been directed to wait with you here. The chief will come as soon as he’s able.”
-o-o-o-
A SINKING FEELING filled my stomach. Was this the end of my angelic career? Kiko seemed to think I was toast, but she’d never liked me anyway. I wished I could ask Cleo, but the only way I could contact her would be through the boss. I told myself, Best not to annoy him anymore than you already have.
Honah eventually appeared. Without saying goodbye, Kiko turned into an osprey again and flew off.
It seemed like I’d waited for hours, but it was probably only a few minutes. On the plus side, he didn’t seem mad, but I wasn’t sure. I’d never seen him mad. Lots of times, he’d looked worried or frustrated, but never angry.
In an instant, he would’ve downloaded all my memories since the last time we’d met. I didn’t have to tell him the thing, and I didn’t.
Infernal Justice (Angels at the Edge Book 2) Page 7
