by John Conroe
Chris attacked the food like it was a super villain and I shoed Em out the door, promising I would let her know if we needed anything else.
I broke the chocolate milk out of the fridge and asked if he wanted any. A quick smile, a nod yes, and he was back in the food. Pouring us each a glass, I set his in front of him and left the jug on the table. Four breakfasts were gonna require a lot more than one glass of milk.
“I thought my friend Caeco ate in bulk,” I commented, pretty much in awe of his intake rate. He laughed around a mouthful of pancake, swallowed, and drank half his glass of milk before replying. “How is Caeco?”
“She’s good. She’ll probably be here by lunchtime. We texted earlier,” I explained.
“Good, I’d like to see her again,” he said. “As to eating, I’m kinda like a shrew… if I don’t eat, I die… victim of my own metabolism.”
“Like werewolves? Levi told me that weres eat a ton.”
“Yeah, like that, only worse.”
“Ah… will Tanya need to eat… er… drink or whatever when she wakes up later?” I asked, wondering if having a vampire queen around was a good idea.
“She will,” he said, nodding, a slight smile on his face. “But I’ll feed her. She won’t drink from anyone else. That’s another reason I eat so much.”
“Oh, ah, that’s good, then,” I said awkwardly, but thoroughly relieved. Then my stupid mouth went ahead and asked the main question I’d been harboring. “Ah, like… what are you?”
Shit! Did I really just ask that?
He stopped eating and sat back, looking at me full on, pausing uncomfortably for like five seconds that seemed like five minutes.
“You know, Declan, I get that question a lot, and I don’t really like to answer it,” he said, making me feel like a complete dick. “I usually just make up some wiseass remark. And I don’t like witches much… but I really like you and your aunt. Plus… I really only sort of found out what I was when we were both in that silo in New Hampshire. So, I’ll tell you.” He paused and got a kind of thoughtful look on his face, then laughed. “I can’t really remember how I got this way… just bits and pieces… but I can now tell you what this way is. How screwed up is that?”
It must have been rhetorical because he didn’t wait for an answer.
“Anyway, my main lot in life has always been hunting demons. From twelve years old on. You could say that I’m kind of a demon-exorcising savant. I don’t need a Bible or Holy Water, just my hands. Then I met her,” he said with a nod at the beautiful girl on the couch. “I don’t remember a lot about the last two years, just faces and moments in time, and that’s an improvement from where I was when I first got shot. But I do remember meeting Barbiel,” he said, trailing off.
“Barbiel?”I prompted.
“He’s an Angel—the one assigned to me.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. I mean, I had a vampire sleeping or lying daydead or whatever the hell she was doing on my couch and I was a witch, so why should discussing Angels be weird? But it’s easy to talk about dark stuff—demons, vampires, and weres—although my outlook on vampires and weres had improved quite a bit. But to talk about Angels, the direct agents of God, seemed surreal. Like everybody wants to know they’re on the side of good and right, but how many religious-spouting whackjobs claim to have seen Angels and been directed on some mission or other by God? So it threw me.
“Yeah, weird, right? I didn’t believe it myself. But he convinced me,” Chris said, reading my expression.
“You didn’t believe him?” I asked.
“You don’t believe me now! Why would I believe some guy when he said he was an Angel? Although he never really came out and said it. Plus he kept disappearing. Anyway, over time, I started to believe. You see, the religious people in my childhood all told me I was God’s Warrior—that I was Touched by God. Barbiel explained that I was a carefully planned upgraded soldier in an arranged battle that has been going on for thousands of years. A struggle between Heaven and Hell.”
“And you remember all this, but you don’t remember meeting her?” I asked, incredulous.
He frowned, and I suddenly got nervous. Good job, idiot. Piss off the uber warrior. Then he looked embarrassed and shrugged. “I know, right? I mean, look at her! Nobody should look that good. And I don’t remember the first time I laid eyes on her. I have glimpses and glimmers and I get more all the time, but my first look at her had to be huge! And I’ve got none of that,” he said, closing his eyes in obvious anguish.
I felt like a complete shithead. Dick move, O’Carroll!
“Well, at least you’re getting stuff back right? It’ll come back,” I said lamely.
“Yeah, maybe. Anyway, the thing is when I died back there in that missile base I had a… meeting of sorts. Barbiel was there, and others. And they welcomed me as a brother,” he said, looking at me and then away, pausing to eat an egg.
“Others? Like other Angels? So if you’re their brother… oh! Oh, I see,” I said, as the whole thing came clear. He looked embarrassed. Which was odd. Shouldn’t he be proud? If not outright braggy about it?
“That’s the implication. And her, too. They said that she and I have always been together, like forever,” he said.
The more I thought about what I had seen him do, the more I decided that I believed him. Plus, he was so damned humble about the whole thing.
“I asked Toni what you were, and she said you were her Guardian Angel. It makes sense,” I said.
“She said that?” he said, pinning me with his violet eyes.
I nodded. “She was telling us about how you would be coming to get her. You and Tanya and Awasos… and Grim.”
He froze at that, staring at me. “She told you about Grim?”
“Yeah, she was preparing us, I think. She said that Grim was scary, trying to get us ready, which frankly no one could have.”
“She’s afraid of Grim?” he said, putting his fork down and staring at his third plate of food morosely.
“Ah, no. That’s not what I said. She was telling us that your other… er… that you… well, that you might scare us. But she wasn’t the slightest bit afraid of you or your Grim side.”
His head snapped back up. “What?”
“Ah, dude, I’m sure you know this, but that’s one tough-as-nails little girl. Smart, too. She was all alone in a secret base, locked in a jail cell, listening to some high school kid tell her Chuck Norris jokes and she was absolutely, hard-as-granite certain that you were coming to get her. She warned the AIR people. Told them they would regret it. And she admitted she was afraid of the rescue. Said she didn’t like the loud noises and the explosions. Frankly, I thought she was a little unhinged, but then you ripped the door open, tore the cell apart, and scooped her up. And I almost crapped myself. Caeco was even scared, and that girl was designed to be a badass. But your goddaughter was never, even for a second, afraid of you or your other half. She kept hiding her head in your shoulder for Chri… I mean, for Heaven’s sake,” I finished, trying to cover my almost flub. Taking the Son of God’s name in vain in front of what was possibly an Angel made flesh was not my best idea. He caught it anyway.
“Hah, I do that a lot myself,” he said, grinning. “But you really believe she’s not afraid of me?”
“She’s absolutely not afraid of you, the vampire goddess over there, or that giant, fang-filled beast that follows you around! I was shitting myself and she was giggling! She missed her parents the whole time, but it was you that she knew was coming to get her.”
He just stared at me for a moment, then he slowly smiled. “Thank you Declan. When I found out I had a goddaughter, it rocked my world, maybe more than finding out I am what I am. Then I saw how everyone around me is afraid of me. I thought she might be, too.”
“I understand that whole people-afraid-of-you stuff. Virtually all the kids at school are afraid of me, except my friends. It gets kind of old.”
He tilted his head to one side, then g
lanced toward our back door. “Speaking of friends, I think Caeco is here, with her mother and another… a boy maybe your age?”
“Probably Rory, my best friend,” I said, getting up and heading to the door. Sure enough, the three of them were almost at the back door, Rory chatting away, Caeco smiling at me, and Dr. Jensen looking pained at Rory’s nonstop spiel.
I held the door for them, letting them troop past me and on in. As I came in behind them, I saw that Tanya was now standing behind Chris. Freaky. She had been flat out on the couch about five seconds ago and now she was across the room, looking like she’s been awake for hours.
“Ah, Chris and Tanya, this is my friend Rory. Rory, these are the folks I mentioned that we met in New Hampshire,” I said, covering the introductions. “You’ve already met Caeco and her mother, Dr. Jensen.”
Chris came around the table and held out his hand to Rory, who automatically shook it but was having trouble forming words. Looking back and forth between Tanya and Chris and blushing bright red was about all he could manage. I think he got a little faint when Tanya smiled at him and reached past him to shake Dr. Jensen’s hand. Truly fantastic, ammo I could use against him for years and years.
“Hello again, Doctor. I’m not sure I got to really meet you before,” Tanya said to Caeco’s mom.
“Ah, Dr. Jensen was one of the youngest graduates of Stanford’s genetic engineering program,” Rory suddenly said, then went brighter red, if that was even possible.
“I know. I read her thesis paper on Transgenesis,” Tanya said.
“You read my paper?” Dr. Jensen asked, thoroughly startled.
“You stalked my mom?” Caeco asked Rory at almost the same time.
Leaving the two women to discuss viral vector techniques in genetic engineering and Rory rapidly explaining himself, I turned to Chris, who was stacking the now-empty plates onto the tray they’d arrived on.
“So, I’m gonna do a quick walk around the perimeter to check Aunt Ash’s wards. It won’t take long but it does get us outside if you want to go along?” I asked. He nodded, smiling as he watched his girlfriend chatting easily about advances in recombinant technology.
“She’s so much smarter than I am, it’s scary,” he said.
“Really? ‘Cause Caeco’s the same way,” I replied. “Plus, she’s got like this built-in computer thing going on. Not fair.”
He laughed as we walked out the back door, leaving the two women talking at the table while Caeco and Rory followed us, still discussing Rory’s online etiquette or lack thereof.
Rowan West sits on a big trapezoid-shaped property (look at me… using math terms and shit) that sits on the side of Macomb Hill. The narrow end of the property is by the road, where our parking lot and buildings sit. The boundaries arrow outward on the uphill and downhill sides to reach the back line, which is the long side of the trapezoid. The Rowan tree sits almost dead center of the entire one-and-a-half-acre parcel. It’s fairly flat but does slope slightly (we are, after all, on the side of a hill). Our property is on the outside arc of a curving switchback on County Route 213, otherwise known to the locals as Macomb Hill Road. A quarter mile or so up the hill is another, opposite (and nasty sharp) switchback. The cemetery sits on the inside curve of that one, same side of the road as us. Downhill, the road runs almost straight, past a couple of houses before entering the official village limits of Castlebury.
Our place was originally the site of one of the town’s first inns, but those buildings, except for the old storage barn, burned down in the Fifties. Our buildings were put up in the early sixties and have housed some form of restaurant ever since, with the longest-running and most successful being Rowan West. My aunt and mother had left I-89 eighteen years ago and followed Route 117 and the Winooski River till Mom, who was driving, had just decided to take 213 north, arriving over the same hill that Caeco and her mom had. The restaurant had been empty, its previous incarnation having failed for one reason or another. Aunt Ash said that they had been drawn to the spot and had prowled around the closed buildings and found the Rowan tree. Within a day, they had made an offer to the owner, Harold Flynn, who, it turns out, had a soft spot for anything Irish, and pretty women in particular. He held the note on the property and, using the proceeds from their pawned family jewelry, my mom and aunt had started the business. Ten years later, my aunt made the last payment on the loan and burned the mortgage in our Spring Equinox bonfire.
I led Chris and my two friends along the road to the downside corner, then turned right and followed the edge of the woods toward the back of the property. An old stone wall marked the property line, and Aunt Ash’s wards were carved into some of its rocks. Spaced about ten feet apart, she used various combinations of the more protective runes to establish our supernatural fence.
Chris was able to pick out each rune-marked stone before the carvings actually became visible, which I would have said only a witch could do.
“Well, I can sort of see witchcraft,” he explained, strolling along smoothly over the uneven ground. Rory, who was tripping every third step, was, for once, listening raptly to every word.
“Does it have something to do with your odd aura?” I asked.
He looked at me sharply but with a smile. “You can see that?”
“Yeah, it’s a violet color, very like your eyes,” I said.
“You can see his aura?” Caeco asked, sounding a little unnerved.
“Yeah, so what? You can see in the dark,” I pointed out.
“But that’s just biology and physics. The aura thing is supernatural,” she said.
“I’m not sure it’s supernatural. Everything has one. I think they’re just energy fields that aren’t visible in the standard electromagnetic spectrum,” I replied.
“What color is mine?” she asked.
“Mainly blue, like most people’s. Animals are green,” I said, not telling her that she had little flecks of green woven through her blue.
“What about vampires?” Rory asked.
“Tanya’s is white. I never looked at Charles’s. Or Frank’s either, so I don’t know what weres look like.”
“That’s exactly the way I see them, too,” Chris said, surprised.
“What about witches?”
“Blue with specks of flat black,” said Chris. “Weres have strong currents of green mixed in.”
“So Declan has little dots of black?” Rory asked.
“No, Declan has big splotches of black. Other witches I’ve seen have much smaller ones.”
“The bigger the splotch, the stronger the witch?” Caeco asked.
“I don’t know. I can’t remember every witch I’ve ever seen, but I don’t think I’ve seen an aura quite like Declan’s before,” he said. “On the topic of splotches, what are the little blobs of black that I see buried along the treeline?”
“See those too, huh?” I asked, no longer surprised. “Those are railroad spikes, somewhere around a hundred or so of them. About six or seven years ago, my aunt drove Rory and I to an old railroad track and promised us a quarter for every loose spike we could find. We found about thirty that day. Thought we were rich. Then we started visiting other tracks and picking up more. We weren’t allowed to try to pry any out of the tracks, just the old, rusted ones. She had us pound them into the ground every six feet or so, and they’ve become part of the protection spells for this place.”
“Iron?” Caeco asked.
“Iron has been involved in magic since we first dug it out and smelted it. Found in earth, strong and hard, it’s infused with protectiveness. We’ve been using iron weapons since we learned to forge. Plus, it has certain properties which repel malicious spirits and beings.”
We were almost across the full back line when Darci stepped out the back door and waved at us. She was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt yet still managed to look somehow official.
We walked across the yard. “Ashling needs you inside for the next part,” she said to Chris. “And you need to p
repare four bonfires and set a circle over in the ritual space,” she directed at me.
I directed my senses toward the restaurant. “She put up the Stay Away spell? What about staff?”
“Sent everyone home with full pay and closed the restaurant, although no customers have shown up for the last hour or so,” Darci replied.
“Wait, really?” I asked.
“What does that all mean?” Chris asked. The others looked just as curious.
“Well, we have some preset spells that either attract business or send it away. But she didn’t turn on the do not disturb sign till just a few minutes ago. So if no one showed about around lunchtime on a Saturday at this place, then something or someone else is keeping them away.”
