Familiar Angel

by Amy Lane

“No,” he said out loud. “In fact, I don’t want to think about the minivan ever again!”

  Emma grimaced apologetically. “I’m so sorry!” she called.

  Edward shook his head grimly. Six brand-new soccer chairs in the back, and a carefully accrued shipment of chemical compounds I’ll have to assemble from scratch.

  More dark magic? Harry asked apprehensively.

  They’re what she used to get Leonard out of hell.

  Harry took a deep breath and met his brother’s eyes. Really?

  We saved you, Harry. It’s time to save Mullins.

  Harry smiled at him, eyes burning, absurdly happy. “Oh.”

  “Oh what?”

  “Now I know why you all tried so hard to save me.”

  Edward and Francis were both staring at him anxiously, almost begging him to say it.

  You love me as much as I love you. I never really thought of it before.

  And that quickly, he was holding Francis as a person, sobbing in his arms, while Edward draped himself on top of them both in comfort.

  THE SUV blew a rod while passing a tiny nameless town. Emma steered it, knocking so loud the pistons sounded like they were coming through the hood, into the one gas station/minimart combo in the place and slumped in the front seat, sighing.

  “What now?” Harry asked from the back seat, although neither Leonard nor Emma looked terribly unhappy.

  “Now?” Emma glanced back with a weary smile. “Now we go inside and get something cool to drink.”

  “Cool?” Francis stammered. “Cool? We’re… the car…. Bel!”

  “Is fine for now,” she said with determined calm it was clear she didn’t feel. A faint smile tugged at her pretty features. “Boys… boys, boys. Please—when Edward and Harry first proposed helping young Mary Quinn escape, do you have any idea how frightened I was?”

  Edward pulled his chin in, like he did when he was surprised. “Why would you be frightened? We had a plan, the three of us were clearly superior fighters. We weren’t as powerful as we are now, but we had the tactical edge—”

  Emma’s sudden laugh felt like clear water in that stifling, stinking car. “You did indeed. And I had to trust in the fates, didn’t I? Have faith in the God and Goddess, and a little bit in fate, that my three boys would take on this challenge and be all right. Don’t you agree?”

  Francis hissed like a cat and turned his face to the open window. Next to them, a pickup truck pulled up, one of the bigger models, with primered quarter panels and a smoothly running engine.

  “Yes,” Harry said, to finish conversation so they could get out of the car. “So you had faith. How is faith going to get us a car?”

  Next to the pickup truck, a brown Cadillac pulled up, with a reasonably clean body and a couple of minor dents.

  Harry squinted as a tall man with dark curly hair and a cynical twist to his lip got out of the pickup truck, and an older, thinner man with a good-ol’-boy smile got out of the Caddy. They said a few words, the younger guy shrugged, and then he walked around the truck to open the door for his passenger.

  “It just will,” Emma said insouciantly. “I can’t even tell you how I know. Sometimes magic is just trusting the pull under your breastbo—”

  Harry got out of the SUV to get a better look at the guy who’d gotten out of the passenger seat of the truck.

  “Who are you?” he asked point-blank.

  The driver—the dark-haired, cynical one—tilted his head. “You can see him?”

  Harry opened his mouth and closed it again, and his friend with the Caddy joined them. “He can see who, Tucker?”

  Tucker gave a little gasp and rubbed under his breastbone. “Angel. He can see Angel. And it’s them.” His smile lost its cynical edge, and he looked at the person he’d let out of the truck. “Angel—this is the reason for the pull.”

  Angel smiled at them all and waved, and Harry caught his breath.

  “You’re….” Amorphous was the first word he thought of. Harry couldn’t get a lock on Angel’s features. He seemed to see a beautiful redheaded woman one moment and a good-looking young man with auburn hair the next. A slim-hipped brunette one moment, a blond lumberjack the next. But even that was superseded by the one familiar and consistent thing on Angel’s body.

  “Wings,” Harry said, awed.

  “I don’t see them,” Edward said skeptically at his side.

  “That’s because you’ve never touched them.” Harry remembered the feeling of them not touching his skin, the whisper-soft presence of something that would never actually make contact but whose beauty could be felt across space and time.

  Angel’s features resolved themselves into an auburn-haired young man who smiled happily at the Youngblood family. “Look, Tucker. They’re all together. Do you want to adopt them too, like Josh’s family?”

  The older man next to them rolled his eyes. “Are these the people who need the Caddy?” he asked sourly. “We traveled an awful long goddamned ways to just abandon a car with strangers.”

  Tucker smiled and let his shoulders sag. “Yeah. Give them the keys.”

  Harry’s eyes opened wide as Josh handed Emma the keys in his hand, held together on a key ring with a map of Sacramento on it. “There wouldn’t be any clothes in the back of that car, would there?” he asked, his stomach a little fluttery.

  Josh said, “Oh damn! I almost forgot, the wife packed me a….” He looked Harry up and down. “Spare change of clothes that I will never see again,” he muttered. “Jesus, kid, your life makes me crazy. Can we get a frozen burrito and go home now?”

  “I’ll come with you,” Leonard said, holding out his hand. “Leonard Youngblood. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Josh Greenaway. And leave me out of whatever you all are doing. Tucker and his damned pulls under his stomach. I’m over it.”

  “Excellent!” Leonard said, in good humor as always. “Frozen burritos on me!”

  Edward and Francis shook hands with Tucker awkwardly, and Emma shepherded them away after giving Harry the keys.

  Harry stared at Angel longingly, not able to put a damned thing in his heart into words.

  Then Angel saved his life. “He’s okay, you know,” he said conspiratorially.

  “Who is?” Harry rasped—but he was almost afraid to think it.

  “Why, the angel you’re afraid for. He’ll be okay. Have a little faith, can we?”

  “It’s not always as easy as that,” Tucker said gently at Angel’s side. He cupped Angel’s elbow in a way that bespoke great intimacy.

  Angel’s wings fluttered, and Harry looked at them longingly. He closed his eyes, remembered Suriel asleep in the night, at peace, ready for what was to come.

  “I can have faith,” he said humbly.

  When he opened his eyes, Angel was smiling benevolently at him. Tucker held out his hand. “Good luck to you,” he said softly.

  Harry took his hand and shook. “Thank you. I’m not sure how you knew, or even what you’re doing here—but I’m grateful.”

  Tucker rolled his eyes. “Don’t be too grateful. If I know Josh at all, he brought the jeans with no ass, and the T-shirt’s gonna say something that will get you beat up in any redneck bar in the country.”

  Harry laughed. He had to. “They’d have a fight on their hands,” he said mildly.

  “Oh Jesus—one of those. Well, you want to pay it back to me, enforcer, come fight ghosts in the foothills, okay? Those fuckers almost killed me last time.”

  Angel turned a bleak look toward Harry. “It’s important that doesn’t happen,” he said with so much sincerity Harry found himself nodding too.

  “C’mon, Angel. I want a soda the size of Lake Folsom, and more chocolate than should be allowed by law.”

  They disappeared into the store, and Harry could hear Angel’s plaintive “But why would chocolate become illegal?” before the door closed.

  He closed his eyes on the blazing asphalt in front of the random quickie mart where their hast
ily stolen car had died.

  Fate. Karma. God or Goddess, somebody needed to be thanked.

  When his heart felt clear again, he ran to fetch the clothes in the back of the Caddy so he could change in the bathroom. He really wanted to get out of these stinking basketball shorts.

  ONE SPLASH of water on his pits later, he was taking a giant bottle of water from Leonard and loading into the Cadillac with his family. The vehicle was decently maintained, with leather upholstery and air-conditioning that could probably start icicles on the windows if they ran it long and hard enough.

  Harry filled his palm with a handful of M&M’s before finally asking Emma what in the hell all that was about.

  Since Leonard was driving, Emma could turn around and face him in the back seat. “Do you ever wonder,” she began, using her fingertips to smooth his hair back from his temples like she had when he’d been younger. “Do you ever wonder at the odds of three boys being hidden under a bramble bush by the river, just when I needed three boys to hold my power the most? Just when Leonard and I needed a family to care for so we wouldn’t be afraid? When Mullins needed a reason to fight his way free of hell and Suriel needed to find his faith again?”

  Harry blinked at her. In all this time, he hadn’t wondered once. “Should I have?”

  “Yes and no,” she said, looking supremely catlike—which was funny, because shape-changing was not one of her talents, not anymore. She’d given her cat to her boys, and apparently Leonard had given his dog to Bel so he wouldn’t be left out.

  “Yes, because….”

  “Because curiosity didn’t kill the cat—it got him out of trouble when dumb luck wouldn’t do,” she said practically. “This is something Edward knows, but you and Francis not so much. You’ll learn.”

  Edward made a smug sound next to him, and Francis cuffed him over the head. “So, why no? And Francis, you ass, that hurt.”

  Francis hissed and turned back to Emma with a bored expression on his face.

  He is not okay, Edward thought grimly at Harry.

  You think?

  “No,” Emma continued. She reached across Harry and flicked Francis on the forehead without skipping a beat. “Because it’s like being in the eye of a hurricane. When you’re on the outside of it, you can see all the mighty forces of the universe that went into creating that one perfect center. During the moment in time that brought us all together, we were in the center. We didn’t see the forces that worked around us.”

  Harry blinked, remembering that moment of calm, watching Suriel sleep, both of them aware that the world was moving but oblivious to the terrible winds in action right at that moment. “Is there ever a time when we’re the wind?” he asked wistfully.

  Emma smiled and patted his cheek. “Of course, darling. Every rescue we’ve ever made—those girls were the center. And then we were the wind.”

  “So what does this have to do with two friends and an angel at the crossroads?” Edward asked sharply. “And you filled this thing up—will it get us to Vegas?”

  “As long as we don’t stop for hookers,” Leonard deadpanned. Emma flicked him on the ear, and he grabbed her hand and kissed it before putting both hands on the wheel again.

  Emma rolled her eyes but kept talking. “You answered your own question, Edward. Crossroads can be magical places—and the people drawn to them just as magical as we are. I’ll wager the men and the angel have been at the center of the crossroads a time or two and have fixed things for people and sent them on their way.” She chewed her lip and smiled faintly. “And I’d go one step further. I’m sure there are lots of people out there who could have met us at that exact point, with a car and a clean pair of jeans and a….” She read Harry’s T-shirt and winced. “A Dump Trump T-shirt. But only these guys would bring someone who would….” Abruptly the strength and the optimism faded, to be replaced by the worry Harry had felt gnawing in his stomach since he’d faded from the cabin in Mendocino. “Someone who would give you hope. They did give you hope, didn’t they, Harry?”

  Harry nodded, pulling up a smile to help her have strength when his faded.

  “So essentially, they showed up for no other purpose but to have the car we needed and the clothes too,” Harry said, seeing the hint of the grand plan again. Emma had been trying to teach them about the forces that drove the world since that first train ride at her knee—but Emma’s mind worked that way so naturally, the higher purpose of things sometimes left pragmatists like Harry and Edward in the dust.

  “They did indeed,” Emma said, turning back around in her seat. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t be grateful for their service.”

  Harry gave her a few moments. For one thing, he knew looking backward made her motion sick. For another, he wanted to wait until his heartbeat had calmed down and the sweat had stopped beading on his back and under his neck. When he felt like he could think again, he asked, “How do we know it was Big Cass?”

  Emma took a deep breath. “Leonard, I’ll let you take that one.”

  Leonard kept his eyes on the road and took a big pull of his soda before answering.

  “Okay, so we started calling the girls who had been rescued in Vegas, and they—to a one—had reported being followed or had disappeared. The girls who hadn’t disappeared had seen him. And, oddly enough, they all had seen him, and they all had fought back. One girl called to him—‘Hey, motherfucker!’—from her second-story apartment building and dumped boiling water on him, which really, should have just pissed him off. But—and these are her words, mind you—she said it seemed to make him smaller. Another girl just ran at him, attacking, fingernails to the eyes, balls-out. She said he flailed and clocked her across the jaw, leaving her pretty helpless—and then he ran away. So the fighting back really seems to work, especially when it shouldn’t. It’s got to be him—he’s made stronger by fear. I mean, a lot of bullies or abusers are made stronger by fear, but this seems to be in an actual, physical way.”

  Harry let out a breath. “Tough girls,” he said. Tougher than he was—the irony wasn’t lost on him either. He’d been the one to rescue them.

  “Well, yes, but most of them said they remembered your bravery, Harry, so don’t forget that. But anyway, the last girl who was taken lived in San Diego, and we got there mere hours after she’d been dragged away—kicking and screaming, I might add—but not by Cass. So we were close enough to do a scry, and that’s when….” He scowled. “Goddammit, Beltane. ‘Don’t worry, Dad, I’m just going to take a look around. Nobody shoots dogs, right?’”

  “Jerk,” Francis muttered. Harry was pretty sure he wasn’t talking about Leonard.

  “So do we have any idea where we’re going?” Harry asked, patting Francis on the shoulder. “Or do we just figure Vegas?”

  “Well, we figure Cass is probably working for the same outfit we busted a few years ago. We contacted Corbin—you remember him?”

  “Bureau for Missing and Exploited Children?” Because they’d cultivated as many contacts as they could in government agencies. For all their resistance to bureaucracy and authority, the Youngblood family was who those people called when things went wrong.

  “That’s the one. Anyway, he says a guy who looks a lot like Big Cass’s boss has a semipermanent thing in Vegas. They have a line on abandoned casinos in the outer parts of the city proper. Every time Corbin gets close to them in one venue, they pick up stakes and move. But they don’t have the resources we do. We figure—”

  “Put three cats on the ground, see if we get close enough for Francis to hear Bel, and we can do what we need to.” Beltane hadn’t studied enough, hadn’t practiced enough to float around in everybody’s head the way the familiars could—but he and Francis had been practically in each other’s pockets since Bel was born.

  “Yes, and I can talk to the birds,” Emma added. When she’d shifted much of her power to the familiars in that first act of magic, bird speech had been one of her favorite things to remain in her control. One of the first t
hings the boys had learned was not to chase after the birds she spoke to—they were always friends.

  Harry had to laugh. “So essentially, we get there and kick a little ass.”

  “Yup,” Leonard said. “Maybe take some names.” He smiled, the kind of smile that reminded them all that he’d spent over three hundred years as a demon in hell. “Maybe leave a few bones to be scoured by the desert, unlamented and unlabeled.”

  Emma smacked his arm. “Leonard!”

  But Leonard’s fierceness reassured Harry. He tilted his head back into the space between the window and the seat and closed his eyes.

  “Wake me when the ass-kicking starts,” he mumbled. Edward leaned against him on the left, and Francis leaned against him on the right, the way they’d always leaned, even when they were kids sleeping on their pallet in the brothel. Harry was their center. He’d keep them safe.

  And now, now that everything and nothing had changed, he realized he prized that identity. No wonder he’d denied his fear of Big Cass. He would have done anything, pretended anything, faced anything, to be the man his brothers leaned on.

  Well, after a hundred and forty years, he was going to have to earn that.

  Sleeping now was purely practical—Harry was going to need his strength.

  Dissipation

  FOR ONE reason or another, the Youngbloods had never really embraced Vegas.

  None of them liked the lights—perhaps because they’d been born during a different, quieter time, and although they enjoyed technology, they didn’t worship it.

  The boys had grown up in a brothel. Sex for sale held no appeal. Gambling reminded them of violent days. The crowds felt cruel and impersonal.

  The one thing—the only thing—Harry and, as far as he could tell, his entire family appreciated about Vegas was the view of it as they approached from the west, with great clouds overhead as the city rested, small and delineated, on the surface of the great desert.

  It humbled him, gave him a moment of pause that he was but a servant to the greater world, and the greater world owed him no favors.