Angeli Trilogy: Angeli Books 1-3

by Amy Vansant

  Grumbling to himself, Con followed on his own.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Anne swirled through the windy disorientation of Angeli travel and soon found herself standing in the dark beside the open grave she and Michael had investigated the previous day. The approaching dawn provided little illumination. In the dull glow, Anne could see the ladder now lay in the dirt beside the hole.

  “We need to talk,” said Michael.

  “We need to find Jeffrey,” she said, avoiding his eyes.

  Michael gently touched Anne’s chin, raising her gaze to his own.

  “There’s too much going on, too much at stake. I can’t have you refusing to talk to me.”

  Anne stepped away and leaned over the open grave to call for Jeffrey. She received no response. Her stomach twisted with fear for her friend, and she wished Seth had taken her instead. Facing danger was much less difficult than worrying for a friend.

  “Can we call a truce until we have time to talk about this?” said Michael.

  Anne sighed and turned to face him.

  “You set me up,” she said. “You brought me here as bait, and now my friend is paying the price.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” said Michael. “You know I wouldn’t use you as bait. Maybe I didn’t tell you everything I knew, but when I called, I thought this was little more than an unusual Perfidian case. I didn’t think this creature could harm you. I thought of him as...” Michael paused, “...as a fan of your work.”

  Anne put her hands on her hips as she scanned the area for movement.

  “Nice try. I’m not flattered. But I do need time to make a list of all the reasons I’m angry with you, so let’s say truce in the meantime. Right now, I need to find Jeffrey.”

  “Agreed,” said Michael.

  Michael picked up the ladder, positioning it back into the grave. Con appeared. Nearly invisible in the dark, his pale hand shone more than the rest of him. In it, he held an opaque plastic bag, which he handed to Anne. She took it and Con’s hand grew less brilliant as the rest of him brightened, making it easier to see him.

  “Any sign of Jeffrey?”

  “Not yet,” said Anne.

  She looked into the bag and found flashlights.

  “Good thinking,” she said.

  “Hopefully the local hardware store will forgive me,” said Con. “There are batteries in there as well, if you want to do the honors.”

  Anne went to work putting the batteries in the flashlights, and handed one back to Con, whose hand solidified for the job.

  “Did you see Meili and the others?” asked Anne looking around the Brice House side yard.

  “No reason to wait for them,” said Michael. He made a move to start down the hole.

  Con handed a flashlight to Michael, but the Angelus waved it off as he descended the ladder. “I can see fine,” he said as he made his way down.

  “I can see fine,” mocked Con.

  Anne hung the bag on her wrist and followed Michael down the ladder. Con popped to the bottom of the grave and waited as the other two finished their climb.

  “Even Michael used the ladder,” said Anne to Con as she stepped off the last rung. “You’re having way too much fun with your new powers.”

  By the light of her flashlight, Anne could see Con grin. She turned the beam towards the pile of bones.

  “Janey mack,” Con muttered. “That is a lot of bones.”

  “We must have been wrong about the photo. Jeffrey’s not here,” said Anne, her voice heavy with disappointment.

  “At least not alive,” said Michael.

  Anne glared at him.

  “Maybe he left a clue here,” said Con. “This monster doesn’t seem to be the most direct fellow in the world.”

  The three of them sifted through the pile of bones, looking for anything that might hold significance. The light of Anne’s flashlight fell on a packet of papers, wrapped in string.

  “Look at this,” Anne said, retrieving the pack. She tugged at the bow that secured the cluster of curling documents.

  Michael stepped close to Anne and illuminated the area with a blue glow. Con scowled, his flashlights rendered useless.

  Anne flipped through the thick sheets, finding they were not papers as she first thought, but photographs. Each photo portrayed people doing something ordinary, unaware of the photographer. In each, sometimes nearby, sometimes in a reflection, Seth appeared in one of his various stages of decay. In a few, Anne recognized the Perfidian who had attacked her in Mexico City. In others, Seth appeared less human, until in the newest photos, he resembled the human-shaped blur in his picture with Ariel.

  Con pulled one photo out of the bunch, recognizing Seth the way he had appeared during their fateful meeting in Mexico.

  “Do you think the people in the photographs are the people in this pile of bones?” asked Anne. “Oh Jeffrey!” She frantically flipped through the photos again. Reaching the end of the pile, she released a sigh of relief.

  “I don’t see a photo of Jeffrey, so I guess that’s a good sign.”

  Anne put the photos on the ladder step and returned to searching through the pile for other clues.

  “There must be something here about Jeffrey.”

  Beside her, Con solidified his hands so he could pick through the pile.

  “Finger, finger, arm, rib, rib, leg bone,” mumbled Con as he worked his way through the bones. After a moment he stopped. “Hey.”

  “What?” asked Anne, noting the change in his tone.

  “There are no skulls.”

  Anne stepped back and viewed the pile in its entirety. Piles and piles of bones. No skulls.

  Anne turned to Michael. “There were skulls the last time we were here, right?” she asked, wondering if her memory had failed her.

  “Definitely.”

  “Why would all the skulls be gone?”

  Before any one of them could offer an explanation, a string of loud noises echoed outside, repeating a dozen times in rapid succession. The commotion sounded like a multi-car pileup.

  “What the hell was that?” asked Con.

  “A lot of glass breaking?” said Anne.

  “Just a few blocks away,” said Michael, nodding in agreement with Anne’s guess. “Main Street?”

  Con disappeared. Anne felt Michael grab her arm and they, too, flew from the grave.

  A moment later, Anne found herself at the bottom of Main Street.

  Anne pulled her arm from Michael’s grasp.

  “I wish you’d warn me before you do that.”

  Anne’s complaint fell on deaf ears. No one, not even an Angelus, could hear her muttering over the wailing of the alarms that now split the night sky. Though it was only a few minutes after five in the morning, dozens of people congregated on Main Street. Most hovered near the front of the shops that lined the brick main road.

  “This can’t be good,” said Anne.

  Michael strode toward the crowds, Anne breaking into a trot to keep up with the lanky Angelus. As they passed each store, Anne noticed the shops all had one thing in common: broken windows.

  Anne weaved through the growing crowd, surveying the damage as she went. The police had already arrived and were busy trying to clear the area and dissuade potential looters.

  Anne picked a store the police had not yet reached, and took a few steps through the hole where a pane of glass once stood. Several feet into the store, she spotted something she hadn’t expected to see.

  “Anne!” called Michael, his voice roaring over the cacophony of alarms still wailing.

  “Here!” said Anne, motioning to him. The Angelus stepped up and into the window display.

  “Look,” said Anne, pointing to the floor.

  Michael followed her finger to the object of her interest.

  Under a rack of t-shirts, surrounded by broken glass, lay a human skull.

  “That can’t be a coincidence,” said Anne.

  “I shouldn’t think,” said Michae
l.

  The two left the store and walked another twenty feet down Main Street. In each shop, they found another skull grinning back at them from a sea of glass. Five stores after their first discovery, they spotted Meili walking towards them, flanked by Napoleon and Keira.

  “Annie,” said Napoleon. “All the windows have been smashed by the missing skulls.”

  “I know, we saw—” Anne answered before the oddity of Napoleon calling her Annie struck. She stopped in mid-sentence and looked quizzically at the Samoan.

  “Con needed to wear something a little more solid while in public,” said Meili. “He chose Napoleon.”

  Anne looked at Keira; the tall woman’s crossed arms and knitted brow telegraphed disapproval.

  “That giant is going to kill you when you’re done,” said Anne.

  Con, in Napoleon’s body, shrugged.

  “There must be a hundred broken windows here,” said Michael. “For one hundred skulls to be thrown through one hundred windows simultaneously, it would take a small army.”

  “Or one very fast Arch Perfidian,” said Anne. “It has to be Seth. He pointed us to the missing skulls.”

  “But why would he smash windows?” asked Con from his home in Napoleon.

  The group continued to survey the damage on Main Street, deep in thought. The crowds grew louder as more and more people walked downtown to investigate the commotion.

  “Yes,” said Michael after some thought. “Con’s right. Why such a silly act?”

  “Maybe he’s practicing,” said Meili. “Seeing what he can and can’t do.”

  “And using the skulls to be sure we know it’s him,” added Anne.

  “Anne!”

  Anne heard her name and swiveled her attention towards the call. She spotted a police cruiser with two policemen trying to push a struggling shirtless man into the back seat of the patrol car. The man lifted his chin, straining to keep from entering the car, and screamed again.

  “Anne!”

  Anne’s eyes grew as big as saucers as she recognized both the voice and the frantic flailing of her friend.

  “Jeffrey!”

  Anne bolted through the crowds toward the police car, arriving just as the officers closed the door on her panicked and screaming assistant. She peered into the cruiser as she approached and saw Jeffrey cuffed, upset, and wearing nothing but boxers.

  Jeffrey pressed his face against the window, his mouth open, his eye pulling down like a zombie’s as he dragged his face up the glass.

  “Officers!” said Anne, straightening. “I know this man, why is he being arrested? Jeffrey! I’m here!”

  Anne knocked on the glass. Seeing her, Jeffery rolled back his eyes and heaved a great sigh of relief.

  “We found him in a booth at the Café Normandy Restaurant after hours,” said the officer, positioning himself between Anne and Jeffrey. “Actually, we found him hogtied in a booth. We don’t know what, if anything, he has to do with the windows breaking, but I can tell you being found hogtied in a restaurant makes you a person of interest.”

  “Hogtied?” Anne leaned down to peer into the window of the police cruiser. “Hogtied?” she mouthed to Jeffrey. Still cuffed, Jeffrey could only offer a handless, exaggerated shoulder shrug, mouthing, “I don’t know.”

  “How do you know this man?” asked the officer, stepping in front of her again.

  “He works for me,” said Anne. “Do you have to take him?”

  “We do,” said the officer. He moved to make his way around to the driver’s side. “You’re welcome to meet us down there Miss, uh...”

  “Bonny,” said Anne, trying to figure out how she was going to get Jeffrey out of his mess.

  “Miss Bonny,” echoed the policeman. “We’re taking him—” The officer stopped in mid-sentence. “Bonny?” he asked. “Anne Bonny?”

  “Mm hm,” said Anne. She tried to attract the attention of Michael and the others still standing on the opposite side of Main Street without actually waving to them, paying little attention to the policeman.

  “Miss Bonny, are you in town to investigate those bones?” asked the officer.

  “Yes. Like the pirate— Oh, what?” Anne snapped back to attention.

  “I read about you in the paper,” said the officer, stepping toward Anne. “Miss, if you could please turn around and put your hands behind your back for me.”

  “What?” squeaked Anne, but by then, the officer had turned her by putting steady pressure against her shoulder. He reached for his cuffs. She heard the first snap, and felt cold metal close on her wrist.

  “Miss Bonny, every single one of these windows was broken by a skull, an old skull that probably came from the grave you came to investigate,” said the officer calmly, as he finished cuffing her. “Then one of your people is found bound and gagged in one of the vandalized businesses. Guess what that means?”

  Anne’s mouth hung slack with shock as the officer opened the back door of his cruiser, gently pressed on her head, leading her into the back seat beside Jeffrey.

  “I’m a person of interest?” peeped Anne.

  “Bingo,” said the officer, making sure her feet were in the cruiser and shutting the door.

  “Hi,” said Jeffrey, “I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you!”

  Anne glowered at him. “Oh, me too.”

  Jeffrey tilted his head in confusion.

  “Wait. Are you in cuffs, too?”

  Anne sighed.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  At 9:12 a.m., Anne and Jeffrey stepped from police headquarters and into daylight. Anne surveyed the parking lot and concrete around them, searching for a starting point. Now that Jeffrey was safe, the time had come to focus on the larger issue at hand: how to find and stop Seth.

  Anne sighed, realizing at that moment, the police station parking lot felt like the most peaceful place on earth, far away from the horrors she knew lay ahead. She couldn’t help but think that when a police parking lot felt like heaven, she’d made some poor life decisions.

  Unable to raise Michael on the phone, and assuming Con would be unable to drive even if he could find a car, Anne called a cab to take them back to the hotel.

  “Work for someone for three hundred years and they don’t even pick you up at the police station,” grumbled Anne.

  “It was kind of exciting, though, being interrogated. I’d never been interrogated,” said Jeffrey.

  “What did you tell them?” asked Anne, squinting in the sun as they waited. She stretched and yawned.

  Jeffrey pulled the blanket the police had given him tightly around his naked shoulders.

  “I told them some highly intoxicated friends of mine were playing a joke on me when the windows started crashing. They panicked and left me in that booth.”

  “And they bought that?”

  “I pretended to be a little drunk. And I figured those butch officers probably already think gay men spend all their time gallivanting around in boxers and hogtying each other.”

  “Seems reasonable. That’s certainly what I always assumed.”

  “Plus, even they didn’t think I would hogtie and leave myself at the scene of the crime.”

  “Good point. I’m not sure it’s physically possible.”

  Jeffrey rubbed his wrists. “What did you tell them?”

  “I told them I came out of the hotel when I heard the commotion. I left out the part about you being kidnapped by a monster.”

  “Probably a good idea.”

  A rusted yellow taxi entered the parking lot and rolled to a stop. Stepping into the older model Lincoln, Anne and Jeffrey shared a quick glance at each other, swapping the universal symbol for something stinks by wrinkling their noses. The cab, with its well-worn seats and tattered belt buckles, smelled like cigarette smoke, cheap car freshener and sweat. Anne knew no matter where you traveled there were always constants, and the strange musty smell of cabs was one of them.

  On the ride back to the Maryland Inn, Anne discove
red Jeffrey had no idea what had happened to him. He remembered looking for something to wear, and then awoke in a restaurant booth, tied and half-naked, two policemen staring down at him.

  “I can’t believe you don’t remember anything. Do you feel ok? You don’t feel weird or different in any way?” Anne wondered if it were possible for Jeffrey to turn into a bear the way Ariel had after a kidnapping encounter with Seth.

  “Weird?” Jeffrey put his hand on his chest, preparing to panic should the occasion call for it. “Weird? Why would I feel weird? I’m not dead am I?”

  “No...what?” Anne looked at Jeffrey. “Why would you think you were dead?”

  Jeffrey looked away, pretending to be very interested in a cigarette burn on the seat next to him.

  “I mean, like you,” he mumbled.

  “You think I’m dead?” Anne screeched. She spotted the cab driver’s eyes peering at her from the rearview mirror and flashed an awkward smile. The cabbie returned to driving, but Anne saw his gaze drift, and knew she and Jeffrey were again “people of interest.”

  “I’m not dead,” Anne hissed.

  “Well, you’re sort of reincarnated though. Like a zombie...”

  Anne growled and Jeffrey backtracked.

  “I mean a very good-looking zombie. No rotting flesh or anything. A high-functioning zombie.”

  Anne closed her eyes and tried to squelch her temper.

  “Jeffrey, I am not, in any sense of the word, a zombie. And I’m just asking you if you feel…I don’t know…” Anne rocked her head back and forth looking for the right word. “Corrupt?”

  “Corrupt? How exactly, pray tell, does one feel corrupt? Do you mean do I feel the uncontrollable urge to accept a bribe? Are my edges turning brown?”

  Anne shook her head and dismissively waved her hand in Jeffrey’s general direction. He didn’t seem any different from usual. Hopefully, one of the signs of corruption by Seth wasn’t sarcasm; it could go undetected for years in Jeffrey.

  Jeffrey stared at Anne a moment longer and then turned to gaze out the window.

  “Corrupt,” he mumbled. “Funny talk coming from a zombie.”

  Back at the hotel, Anne found a semi-transparent Con waiting for them in their room. He had let Napoleon go back to being himself.