Conspiracy of Angels

by Michelle Belanger

  “But—”

  She cut me off with an irritated gesture. “No buts. My car, my rules. We’re going to your place. Unless you want me to drop you off with the cops over there?” she asked with a nasty smirk.

  “You wouldn’t dare!” I said.

  “Try me,” she shot back.

  We locked eyes for a few tense moments as I mentally tallied all the reasons I should just get out of her car and try for the Harley. Yet that had been my voice on her phone. I’d reached out to her before everything went south. And Lailah—whose name I couldn’t even call to mind without feeling a poignant stab of regret—Lailah was her sister.

  Lil had a stake in this as much as I did.

  “Fine.” I sighed. I shoved Remy’s keys deeper into my pocket and stretched against the bucket seat.

  “Good boy,” she cooed. “Now put this on.” She grabbed one of the charms from the rear-view mirror, unthreading it from the rest. The various pendants jangled musically against one another as she tore it free. I stared at the little pewter half-mask she thrust into my hand.

  “Is this from Phantom of the Opera?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.

  “Just put it on. There’s no point in making things easy on them—whoever they are.”

  I turned the curious little item around in my fingers. “You want me to wear this around my neck or something?”

  “No, Einstein, I want you to clip it to your pretty brown hair,” she shot back. “Of course I want you to wear it. The sooner you put it on, the sooner we can get moving. Your cowl sucks, and I’m not going to run the risk of anyone tracking you like I did.”

  “Wait, you tracked me?”

  She rolled her eyes, reached over, and snatched the necklace. Then she more or less lassoed me with its cord. It got stuck on one of my ears, but she was relentless.

  “What the hell, lady?” I demanded once she had it on me.

  “That’ll do for now,” she muttered. I moved to take it off, and quick as lightning, she reached over and slapped my hand like I was a toddler about to put something dangerous in my mouth. “Don’t fuss with it,” she scolded. “The shield’s delicate. I had to throw all of those together on the fly before I came out here. Didn’t know what I was wading into.”

  “So this is some kind of magic charm?”

  “What else would it be?” she responded so matter-of-factly that I decided it was foolish to argue.

  She put the car in gear and whipped onto the street, maneuvering through the one-ways that led up and out of the Flats. I leaned my head on the neck rest, the wind rushing against my face. It felt weird against the growth of whiskers. Clearly, I was used to a cleaner shave.

  At length she spoke again.

  “You don’t remember anything?” she asked.

  She didn’t seem to mind the November chill any more than I did, and actually had a smile playing round her full, red lips as she lifted her face to the breeze. The way her thick waves of russet hair whipped around her face reminded me of snakes. Of course, for all I knew, I was sitting next to the real-life Medusa. I wouldn’t have found it shocking at that point. Not after everything else that had occurred.

  “I can tell you everything you never wanted to know about the Terminal Tower,” I said bitterly, “but when I woke up, I didn’t even remember my name.”

  She made a thoughtful sound. “Any idea what happened to you?”

  “Not a fucking clue. I went to Heaven to get answers. They were supremely unhelpful.”

  Lil snorted. “You never get straight answers out of the Nephilim. Especially not Sal. Machiavelli’s an amateur by comparison.”

  “Remy seemed decent.”

  She fell conspicuously silent, pecking at the steering wheel with her long red nails. She muttered something to herself and it didn’t sound like English. Even so, it niggled things in some back portion of my brain.

  “What is that?” I asked, canting my head at her.

  “What’s what?” she responded, turning left on a red light once she saw no one coming in the opposite direction.

  “That language. I heard Sal speaking it earlier.”

  She gawked at me, swerving as she nearly missed the entrance ramp to the highway.

  “Mother’s tears, Zack—you forgot that, too?” She turned her concentration briefly back to the road while I gripped the edge of the seat. “No wonder you didn’t have a cowl up. Probably had no idea you needed one.”

  “Bingo,” I replied bitterly. “Give the lady a prize.”

  She whipped the car around the sharply curved entrance ramp and I was glad of my seatbelt.

  “I told Lailah she shouldn’t come back to Cleveland,” Lil growled. “She had a good thing going at the Oriental Institute back in Chicago. But no… you had to lure her to your museum.” She shifted gears and gunned the motor as she merged with traffic. “She should have known better, Zack. You shit trouble on a daily basis.”

  With all that had happened, I couldn’t really argue. I hadn’t been in the city for more than a couple of hours, and already there was a bloody trail of bodies in my wake. Even without the cacodaimons, my life seemed complicated at best.

  I looked down at my hands where they rested against my knees. I turned them over, clenching my long, thin fingers into fists. There were scars along the knuckles, pale but unmistakable. These hands had been in a lot of fights. The echo of those twin blades tingled against my palms. When I’d ended the cacodaimon—or whatever it was—I’d felt fierce exhilaration. Battle lust.

  I was capable of killing. I had probably killed before. I just hoped it was for a good cause.

  Suddenly overwhelmed by a crushing melancholy, I gazed out at the passing cityscape. The wind was cold and crisp, but my awareness of the chill was distant at best. There was just the rush and the rhythm of the open air and the constant sensation as it buffeted my face. It was actually kind of soothing.

  Lil urged the sporty convertible up to ninety and the streetlamps streaked by with hypnotic regularity. I adjusted the seat again, stretching out as much as my long legs would allow. This was the first chance I’d gotten to relax since waking up on the shore of the lake—unless you counted passing out at the club. Dimly, I heard Lil talking to me, but it was increasingly difficult to make out her words. I closed my eyes for just a moment…

  17

  “Hey, Sleeping Beauty. Rise and shine.”

  I had a moment of panic where I thought I was suspended between darkness and void, the sound of churning water mingling with the rhythm of great wings. A dark figure pursued me, wearing an amulet with a stone like a burning eye. He extended fingers wreathed in tendrils of pure night.

  Snapping from the nightmare with a start, I managed not to shout. Flailing a bit, I smacked my hand against the roof of the car. The top was up. The last thing I remembered, we were zipping along I-90 and the top was still down.

  Self-consciously I wiped drool from the side of my mouth. “I fell asleep?” I asked thickly.

  “Passed out, more like.” Lil chuckled. “Whatever you got up to at Club Heaven wore you out. Have you slept or eaten anything in the past twenty-four hours?” she asked. “You look like hell.”

  She leaned in close, keen gray eyes studying my face, and it was hard not to notice her very rich, very feminine smell—all spice, vanilla, and musk. I jerked away, pressing my shoulder against the rolled-up passenger-side window.

  “When did you put the top up?” I asked.

  A sly curl touched her lips as she noticed my discomfort. “I stopped at a gas station before we hit Coventry,” she replied. Settling back behind the wheel of the car, she flipped open the mirror on the visor and ran her fingers through her long, russet mane. “As much as I love to feel the wind in my hair, driving around Ohio with the top down in November isn’t exactly subtle. I wanted to attract as little attention as possible while I cased your place.”

  I peered out at the four-lane divided street. We were parallel parked near a three-way intersection.
A traffic light blinked in the distance, swaying a little in the wind. That part of the road was well lit, with a drug store on one side and what looked to be a repurposed movie theater across from it. The cross street ran down a short incline, leading to high-end storefronts. Lights shone in only some of the windows. At this hour, everything was closed. Behind us, residential buildings—mostly apartments and townhouses—stretched away into the night.

  “I wanted to be sure no one else was watching the place. I’ve driven around a couple times while you snored.” Wryly, she added, “You were loud as fuck. If I didn’t think you needed the rest, I’d have smacked you awake.”

  “Gee, you’re sweet,” I responded, scrubbing grit out of my eyes.

  “Oh, that’s me,” she said with a throaty laugh. “Sugar and spice.” Then her expression turned serious again. “So what went down at Sal’s latest den of iniquity?”

  I wasn’t sure how much I should tell her.

  “How do you know Sal?” I asked.

  She made a sour face.

  “Oh, we go way back.”

  I thought about checking her for fangs, too, but with her warm, bronzed complexion she didn’t seem the type. Also, if I got anywhere near those full, red lips, I was pretty certain she would bite—fangs or no fangs.

  “Spit it out, Anakim,” she said, eyeing my expression.

  I rubbed the heels of my hands against my forehead.

  “Give me a minute. I’m still working through all this Constantine shit.”

  “Get used to it. Everyone you know is a monster,” she said flatly, and she wasn’t joking. I took a careful breath, not wanting to reveal how much that unnerved me.

  “So what are you?” I asked, trying to sound casual about it.

  She fixed me with her lucid, stormy glare. “I’m your worst fucking nightmare, if we don’t find my sister. Now tell me what happened at the club. If we figure out what’s after you, it will help me track its source.”

  “I said it already. Cacodaimons.”

  Irritably, she shook her head. “I call bullshit. Those things don’t come crawling out just to follow someone around.”

  “But Remy said—”

  She cut me off with a sneer. “Don’t tell me what he said. Tell me what you saw.”

  I thought back to those adrenaline-kissed moments at Heaven. The whole experience came flooding back and I realized I could call it up as vividly as one of my visions. My hands buzzed with recollected power, and I could almost feel the blades.

  “Shadows,” I breathed. At that, the words spilled out of me. My eyes were closed, but I hardly noticed. The replay in my mind’s eye eclipsed everything. “Inky black, invertebrate. Sharp teeth, hideous eyes. Long whipping tails and all these little arms. They rode on the corpses, worked them like puppets. I was the only one who could see them.”

  Lil fell silent beside me in the car. When I opened my eyes, she was staring out the driver’s-side window. Little hairs stood up along the tanned length of her forearm.

  “Lil?” I prompted.

  She puffed her cheeks, releasing a shaky breath. “Those sound like cacodaimons all right. What the hell did you and Lailah get into?”

  “I guess we should go check my apartment and find out.” I reached for the door, ready to open it to the night. Lil seized my arm, dragging me to a halt.

  “Isn’t that your car?” she hissed.

  “How the hell should I know?”

  I followed where she gestured. In the apartment building across from us, an old gray Buick was backing onto the street. I should have been trying to stare at the driver, but instead I got side tracked by the bumper stickers. One had a Battlestar Galactica insignia. The other showed a familiar blue police box with a wibbly wobbly proclamation on the nature of time.

  “Pretty sure that’s yours,” Lil replied. “I can smell the geek from here.”

  I frowned at the single working tail light of the retreating vehicle. The Buick had seen better days.

  “Remind me why I drive a car older than most college students?”

  She ignored me, grumbling, “This complicates things.” She released my arm, shoving it off the divider between us. Flipping open the armrest, she revealed a white leather clutch-purse tucked inside. She dug around in the purse and took out—no joke—a little pearl-handled Derringer.

  “Holy crap,” I muttered.

  “All right,” she said, oblivious to my shock at seeing the gun. “We wait a couple of minutes to make sure he doesn’t come back. Then we head in.”

  “Do you always pack heat?” I wondered—and maybe my voice quavered just a little.

  She made a disgusted noise. “Stop being a pussy. It’s not like I’m going to shoot you.” She paused, then added, “Unless you piss me off.”

  From the steely glint in her eyes, I wasn’t entirely certain she was joking.

  18

  Lillee got out of the car and gestured for me to follow. I still wasn’t convinced I should trust her, let alone follow her into a darkened apartment building while she was carrying a firearm.

  “Are you coming, Zack? Where’s your Kimber?”

  “My what?” I asked.

  “Your gun, you idiot.”

  “What part of ‘nothing but the clothes on my back’ did you miss, lady?”

  “So there’s no chance you’ve got keys to this place.”

  “Nope,” I responded, holding out open and very empty hands.

  She muttered a curse, then thumbed a button on her key fob to pop the trunk. Tucking the Derringer at the small of her back and adjusting her blazer over it, she went and rummaged around. She pulled out a device the approximate shape and size of an electric drill, then she grabbed a camel-brown overcoat and draped it across one arm, tucking the hand tool under it.

  “What else you got back there?” I asked, craning my neck to see over the lid of the trunk. “A James Bond Do-It-Yourself Spy Kit?”

  She chuckled despite herself, using her free hand to shut the trunk as quietly as possible. “The trunk of a lady’s car is a lot like the contents of her purse. Mysterious to menfolk like yourself, and intended to remain that way.”

  She began striding smartly toward the other side of the street. She’d parked so close to the car in front that there was barely enough room for me to fit through. By the time I jigged past, Lil was already halfway across, but I easily caught up to her.

  “Seriously, Lil. What if you get caught with that thing stowed in your trunk? Isn’t it illegal or something?”

  She laughed openly at this. It was a warm throaty sound and she only remembered we were trying to be quiet about halfway through. Stopping with one foot on the curb in front of my apartment, she turned to me.

  “On the rare occasions that I have been pulled over, I have never, ever gotten a ticket. No one has asked to look inside my… trunk.”

  As if to elaborate, she pitched her shoulders forward ever so slightly, tilting her cleavage into full view. Then she lifted her storm-gray eyes to mine, regarding me from under her thick nest of lashes. With a coy tilt of her head, she gave me her best come-hither. That warm spice and vanilla scent rolled off of her, and her very female-ness seemed like a palpable force clawing at me.

  “I bet that works on all the lady cops,” I choked.

  Lil batted her lashes and it felt like the temperature of the chilly fall night rose to something measurable in Kelvin. I took a judicious step back, even though my body was screaming that closer would be better—and much more fun. Lil eyed me for a few moments, the curl to her lips unmistakable.

  On the other hand, maybe it does, I thought.

  “Uh, ladies first,” I said with an awkward and exaggerated bow.

  “Always,” she replied primly, and continued toward the apartment building. I made sure she got a head start, then followed cautiously behind. It was a good bet Lil put the fatal back in femme fatale.

  As it turned out, we didn’t need the lock-pick gun. The door sagged partly open. I n
udged it the rest of the way with one elbow, moved into the living room, then automatically reached for the light switch on the inside. A brass pole lamp leaning across a pile of books flickered once then burned out with a sizzling pop. All the other lamps in the room were similarly toppled.

  “Perfect,” I grumbled.

  Lil was still in the outside hallway, checking to see if we were alone. I took several more steps into the mostly darkened room, trying to assess the chaos. It was a nice apartment, as such things go—or at least, it looked like it might have been nice before the hurricane blew through.

  The living room had a central tiled area in front of an inviting stone fireplace. An overstuffed couch and matching loveseat had been arranged in front of the hearth. The couch was tipped on its back, cushions scattered and upholstery slashed. Bookcases that had once lined the walls were toppled to the floor, their contents spilling everywhere. Picture frames had been torn from the walls and tossed haphazardly among the piles of books. The desk and filing cabinet tucked in one corner had been thoroughly ransacked, drifts of papers spilling from manila folders everywhere.

  A conspicuously empty section on the desk suggested that it had once been home to a computer.

  Lillee whistled sharply. “Jeez, Zack. I knew you were a bachelor, but this is excessive even for you.”

  I glared over my shoulder. “Very funny. The place has been tossed.”

  “No shit,” she said, carefully stepping around the scattered piles. She toed one of the books that lay open, pages torn by a hasty hand. “They were hot to get their mitts on something.”

  “Yeah,” I responded glumly, “and I’ve got to figure out what they wanted, when I don’t even remember what I owned.”

  “You got gloves?” she asked. She set the lock-picking gun on a clear patch of beige carpet, fished in her purse, then produced a pair of blue nitrile gloves. Slipping one on, she gingerly picked up one of the picture frames. Glass tinkled as she shook little slivers onto the rug. Her delicately plucked brows went up and she made a little “hrm” sound in the back of her throat. “I didn’t know you were still a collector,” she observed.