It’s as if Idelle can read my mind. “Michael is my supervisor, but he’s not the Big Boss. He’s been given a lot of leeway in running the GA operation. That doesn’t mean he’s infallible or omnipresent.”
“You’re certain that Michael can’t hear us?” I’m not eager to antagonize him either.
“Not unless he’s making a special effort, and if he’s going to take anyone to task, it’ll be me, not you.”
Of all the luck! There’s unrest among heaven’s angels, and Zachary and I have become symbolic of their main point of contention. This can’t help his chances of reinstatement, our dream of reuniting someday.
As the lobby lounge comes into view, Idelle changes the subject. “I heard that you were looking for Joshua. He’s working in the stables today, which is strange. He should be watching over Zachary. I suspect Michael ordered him there to think.”
I take an uncertain step forward. “The stables?”
“Straight ahead until you reach the entertainment district, all the way past the clock at the corner of Marshall Field’s, and turn right at the theater in the round.”
“Marshall Field’s?” I echo.
“Great stores go to heaven,” she replies. “Don’t say that I sent you.”
I’ve heard tales of heaven’s chariots, and I know that ascended souls can sign up for group tours of the stables on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. However, this is my first time here. These magnificent black horses are definitely born of heaven, not earth. They snort and whinny and shake their manes, yet project a greater majesty.
Something is missing, though. The smell of hay, sweat, even manure.
While the Penultimate has its blessings, newly ascended souls, unassigned guardians, and the staff who serve them forgo sensory and, for that matter, sensual delights. No food, no drink, no lovemaking. Apparently, celestial horses don’t eat either.
I find Joshua brushing a stallion. Instead of his guardian uniform, he’s sporting a long-sleeved, western-style shirt with black jeans and boots. He’s tied back his dreads with a gold cord, and his belt buckle reads: HEAVENLY.
In my undead days, I met Joshua once in passing. He was pretending to be a waiter at an Irish-themed chain restaurant in Chicago. My heart may be spoken for, but he’s not someone I’d ever forget. One of the most popular odes in the Penultimate is a tribute to his lush eyelashes. Another celebrates his toned thighs.
“Miranda!” Joshua exclaims. “Hey, girl, I was going to find you later.”
I seize the opening. “Listen, I need you to tell Zachary —”
“Whoa.” At the stallion’s snort, Joshua says, “Not you, boy.” Returning his attention to me, he explains, “My cranky-face archangel supervisor just totally busted me for playing messenger boy.”
“I’m sorry about that, but —”
“Now, you know that nobody is a bigger Miranda-Zachary ’shipper than me. In his time of need and misdeed, I have been Zachary’s most loyal wingman. But I can’t keep on —”
“I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important,” I begin, launching into the story.
When I finish, Joshua says, “Don’t. Panic. Lucy has her own GA.”
“Then can you tell her guardian that —”
“GAs aren’t supposed to compare notes. As Michael says, ‘Collusion could lead to interference’ with our assignments’ free will.”
I cross my arms. “Well, whoever it is obviously isn’t doing a good job of —”
“An angel may encourage,” Joshua recites, patting the horse, “may inspire, may nudge, but each soul ultimately chooses its own fate.”
“I can’t believe this!” I compose myself as a tour group approaches. “You’re trying to tell me to take comfort in the fact that Lucy has a guardian, and you’re trying to tell me that guardians are so limited as to be effectively useless.” I fight to compose myself. “What about you?”
“You know I’m assigned to Zachary. Besides —”
“Zachary would want to know that Lucy is in trouble. He’d want to help her.”
While Joshua digests my argument, I notice a young man from the tour group eyeing us. He looks familiar, but I can’t quite place him. Then I notice his T-shirt. It reads: ARTEMIS GYROS, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS. “Oh, my God! I have to go.”
“What? Why?”
“That man over there? I killed him.” He smelled of lamb and cloves and rosemary. I broke his neck to get a better angle. “He’s the first person I ever drained.”
I’VE GROWN TO LOVE this fuel-sucking car. It’s a 1987 Impaler, a black SUV with red racing stripes, a classic. It used to belong to Miranda. She’s so petite. I remember her sitting on a phone book so she could see over the hood. My girl had her sexy moments and her sinister ones, but sometimes she exuded cute.
I’ve been stuck on I-35 north behind an 18-wheeler with Utah plates for the last half hour. It shouldn’t be much longer. According to the radio news, the wreck near the Buda exit has been cleared. No serious injuries or fatalities, thank the Big Boss.
I send a text message to Quincie to let her know I’ll be a few minutes late for work. I spent the afternoon with a real-estate agent, talking about selling Quincie’s compound outside San Antonio. Quincie inherited it from an egomaniacal vamp who most recently went by the name Brad. She decided she’d rather spend the afternoon shopping with Freddy for a catering van than road-tripping with me.
I suspect part of that decision was about her commitment to all things Sanguini’s and part of it was a desire to avoid memories of Brad himself. Her undeath was his fault.
As I toss my cell into the front passenger seat, Joshua materializes in time to catch it. “Hello, earth angel! I bring news from your beloved in the great beyond.”
“Miranda!” I grin. “How is she?”
Josh tells me that my girl and Harrison have been reunited. Mr. Nesbit is with her, too. It’s awesome news on both counts, especially Harrison. Despite his grand final gesture, I’d honestly doubted he’d make the cut.
Josh goes on to fill me in on Lucy’s transfer from U.N.T. to the newly established Scholomance Preparatory Academy in New England. “Bottom line,” he concludes, “Miranda wants you to boogie up there ASAP and convince Lucy to skedaddle.”
I think it over, weighing my duty to Quincie. “Lucy may not trust me.”
“Dude, are you seriously telling me that you’re not going to try?”
We’ve met before, Lucy and me, the night Miranda was taken from Chrysanthemum Hills Cemetery in Dallas. After my girl was taken, my powers yanked, I heard Lucy cry for help. I found her in the clutches of a vamp and scared him off.
I’ll never forget Lucy, in the midst of her living nightmare, saying, “If there are monsters, there must be heroes. You’re the hero, right?”
She’d nearly lost her life. She’d been confronted with the true demonic for the first time. Most people would’ve been rocking in the fetal position.
Not Lucy. She immediately started looking for Miranda. She’s the one who called the cops. She’s the one who gave me her trench coat when I found myself an outcast from heaven, shivering in the wind.
I excused myself, supposedly to look for clues. Then I ditched her once I heard the sirens. Back then, I had no way of explaining who I was, what I was.
I left Lucy alone on the worst night of her life.
As traffic picks up, Josh changes the radio station and an old Dixie Chicks song comes on. “Um, Zachary?” he prompts. “You’re not going to send me upstairs to Miranda with a ‘no,’ are you? Don’t get me wrong. You know I’m a fan. But she was undead royalty, and every once in a while, I see a flash of that old temper and —”
“Tell my girl . . .” I hit my signal to switch lanes. “Tell her I’ll do what I can.”
“I TRIED CALLING this so-called Scholomance Preparatory Academy,” Zach concludes that evening in Quince’s dining room. “The guy who answered said that I wasn’t on Lucy’s list of approved callers. Worse, they don’t allow un
approved visitors on school grounds.”
I open a leather-bound text on the table. “Sounds like a security measure. If we’re talking about an elite school for children of the rich and famous, that’s not unreasonable.”
My instincts are telling me Zach’s not overreacting. But he’s got to calm down.
Earlier, the angel left me an ominous message, asking that I bring whatever I had on the Scholomance. My mom raised me to become a Wolf studies scholar. I’ve got an impressive home library. But I could fit everything I found on the academy into my backpack.
“Or it might be a cultish isolation strategy,” Zach counters. “Maybe by the time they’re through orientation, the students have broken ties with the outside world.”
“Let’s not rush to ‘cultish isolation,’” Quince says from behind her laptop at the table. “Do you have any experience with this kind of thing?”
“GAs don’t engage the enemy directly,” Zach answers. “That’s archangel territory. I’m not knocking on Satan’s schoolhouse door without more information. I learned better than that from you two.”
Still, his bags are already packed, holy sword and all.
Quince begins reading from her screen. “Ground was broken on Scholomance Preparatory Academy, a private school in Vermont, just over a year ago.” She glances up. “The land was bought at public auction, and the buyer tore down the main house, which gave the historic preservationists hissy fits. . . .”
I’m slowly turning yellowed pages. “The consensus is that the flagship school in the Carpathians was originally a benevolent gathering place. It welcomed sorcerers, magi, shamans, and the like. Over the ages, it may have fallen victim to corrupting forces. Some claim it’s a place where good and evil cross swords. Others argue it’s a school of pure villainy. However . . .”
I reach for a slimmer, more modern-looking volume and open it to a chapter I bookmarked earlier. “A handful of modern scholars — most notably a weresloth from Venezuela — have theorized that it’s a neutral ground. A place where magic makers, the wicked and the honorable, come together on a joint quest for all there is to know.”
“Ambitious.” Quince takes a drag of porcine blood from her U.T. sports bottle. “Though not necessarily satanic. Is it possible that Lucifer lost interest in the school?”
Zach leans over my shoulder to read. “Anything’s possible. But my girl sent down the alarm for a reason. From upstairs, she can see for herself what’s happening to Lucy.”
I move into the living room and turn on the Weather Channel. “Flights have been grounded all over the Northeast,” I call. “But we should be okay on the interstates.”
In the human world, Zach doesn’t legally exist. He doesn’t have a birth certificate, a social-security number, or any valid form of ID. So he can’t get on a commercial airplane. Plus, there’s the issue of our weapons.
“You’re not coming along,” he replies, walking in. “If Quincie doesn’t ride up with me, I can’t make the trip. Technically, as her GA, I shouldn’t risk separating —”
“If Quince’s going, I’m going.”
“What would you tell your parents?” he wants to know. “What about school?”
“My parents are Quince’s legal guardians,” I remind him. “My high school is her high school. Nothing much happens the first week of the semester anyway. I’m a straight-A student. Quince rocked her finals last month. I’ll tell my folks we’re going to visit a friend of yours up north. That’s the truth —”
“Technically,” Quince says at the entryway.
“We drive,” Zach agrees, muting the TV. “At least if something happens to me, I won’t be abandoning Quincie completely. You two will wait at a hotel while I —”
“Wait?” Quince says. “What are you talking about? We’re seniors. We’ve faced down monsters before. Do you really think we would let you go off —”
“Enough!” The angel throws his hands in the air. “For the love of the Big Boss, Quincie, you are my principle assignment. My wholly souled, high-risk, undead principle assignment. It’s my sworn duty to protect you. If you were human . . . Forget it. If you were a freaking martial-arts-master werebear, I wouldn’t let you anywhere near the God-damned place! I might as well renounce the Big Boss and march us both straight to hell.”
That quiets her.
“What about me?” I ask. “You may be our resident expert on heaven. But I’ve been studying the demonic since I was old enough to read.” When he doesn’t answer, I add, “You need my help, Zach. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have called.”
We’re not leaving until dawn because Zach wants to talk to Freddy first.
Meanwhile, Quince and I stop by Sanguini’s. We touch base with Nora. Then we hit my house so I can pack. I don’t have much cold-weather gear. No snow boots. No winter coat. I grab a couple of long-sleeved T-shirts. An extra pair of jeans.
On my bedroom carpet, Quince plays tug-of-war — using a thick, knotted white rope — with the quickly growing German shepherd pups, Pecos and Concho.
Nora will take care of the dogs while we’re gone.
“Have you considered stretch denim?” Quince asks.
I pat my flat stomach. “You trying to tell me something?”
She laughs, and Pecos bounds up to lick her face. “News flash, Wolf man. You’re stretchy. Shape-change-y. For those shifts when you can’t start au naturel, it might be nice not to trash your whole outfit. Less painful and expensive, too.”
I hold up a ski boot that fit back in sixth grade. Then I toss it back in the closet. My black cowboy boots will have to do. “You don’t find tattered shirts sexy?”
“On you?” Quince replies, suddenly flirtatious. “Or off you?”
Uh . . . “Which would you prefer?”
We didn’t tell Zach. But yesterday my folks took Meghan with them to a destination wedding that Mom is working in Hawaii. They’ll be gone two and a half weeks. We’ll call. We’ll text. Quince and I will be back before they realize we’ve left. I hope.
“I’ve never seen Zachary so freaked out,” she says, scratching Concho’s belly. “I get that he’s worried about Miranda’s friend, and any place associated with the devil is profoundly disturbing, but —”
“It’s the ‘Miranda’ in that sentence that’s your answer,” I reply. “Love makes people crazy.” I pull Quince up and kiss the tip of her nose. “I should know.”
Her half smile reminds me that we don’t leave until sunrise. Temptation tugs.
Thank God that my family is off doing the hula.
Thank God that her guardian angel has other plans.
AT 2:30 A.M., Nora comes home and informs me that Quincie stopped by the restaurant with Kieren but didn’t stay to work. Quincie loves to work.
When she doesn’t answer her phone, I jog to the Morales house and catch a glimpse of her silhouette intertwined with Kieren’s through the Wolf’s bedroom window. The world over, GAs are watching over assignments in more intimate clenches.
But my being corporeal makes sticking around seem, at most, perverted and, at least, like I should get a life.
At 3 A.M., Freddy pours us each a cup of coffee and adds a shot of Baileys to his. “The devil himself, eh?”
Freddy is firmly human, about forty with bleached hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Each night at the restaurant he plays Count Sanguini, leading dinner guests in a midnight toast.
He was raised in the human servant community that caters to upper-echelon vamps. As an adult, Freddy made a life for himself on the fringes of that underworld. He stuck around only because his twin, Harrison — the same Harrison who’s keeping my girl company upstairs — was the personal assistant to the undead king. Freddy’s not the kind of guy who could just walk away. He couldn’t leave his own brother to the monsters, even if Harrison was staying by choice.
“About your plan to rescue this Lucy,” Freddy begins again. “If this Scholomance Preparatory Academy doesn’t allow visitors or calls, how do you plan
to contact her? Do you have an e-mail address? Are you connected on some social-networking site?”
I open Quincie’s laptop. “I’m not a detail guy.” Or, for that matter, a Web guy.
“Hmm.” He hands me a steaming mug. “Some years ago, I had the occasion to encounter an alumnus of the Scholomance’s Carpathian campus — a necromancer — at one of His Majesty’s galas.” Freddy slides into a kitchen chair. “He was coming on to an Old Blood aristocrat. You know how it is with eternals and necromancers.”
I’m willing to take his word for it.
Freddy adds, “He claimed the building’s physical structure was impenetrable. Unless you’re an enrolled student or a staff or faculty member, simply touching the outside — a door knocker, a chimney, or a window — is enough to trigger a fatal magical charge. That defense system is a Scholomance trademark. You can bank on it.”
“How does anyone get in?” I want to know.
“An incantation making individuals immune to the charge is routinely completed for students upon admission. Faculty and staff, too, I’d assume.”
I don’t want to find out what it means for an immortal angel to be magically electrocuted. “Any suggestions?”
Freddy shoos me from the computer. “If it were any other demonic establishment — any other not potentially affiliated with Lucifer, that is — I’d suggest we ask for the eternal queen’s assistance. But in this case, I recommend faking it.”
“Stick to your real names. That’s how you’ll be identified in the spell. You don’t want to end up in a coma or worse because you used an alias.”
Freddy is a genius. Anyone on the receiving end of that note would assume Kieren and I — like him and Harrison — had been raised off the grid among the living servants to the high-class vamps. “I’m still not sure about taking Kieren.”
Freddy’s hand hovers over the keyboard. “Would you like me to go instead?”
Diabolical Page 4
