by Greg Curtis
There was absolutely nothing any of them could do about the Choir.
“She's out there – isn't she?”
“Go and clean up.” Garrick sighed, knowing there was no point in answering her. She didn't trust him and she wouldn't believe him no matter what he said. It was easier to ignore her than argue. So instead he turned and headed for the kitchen. Maybe she'd be easier to deal with when she had some food inside her. He doubted it though.
When he got to the kitchen he did the sensible thing and poured the rest of his beer down the sink before he started on dinner. It was a pity watching the frothy brown nectar gurgle away, but he knew that Cassie was nearby, no doubt watching the girl. And if she was watching her then it stood to reason that she was also probably watching him. From there he could guess where her thoughts would lead. Drinking alcohol while in charge of a minor. It wasn't just his guest who would be in the angel's sights. And there were so many parts of his life she disapproved of. The beer was just the beginning of his failings. It was for that reason that he grabbed his weapon from the side table where it had been lying and holstered it. The Choir did not approve of their bastard children carrying weapons. Not even the ones who were FBI agents.
In Cassie's view Garrick was overly concerned with recreation and wasted his life in a pointless job that was unworthy of him and the gift he had been given. His dvds and books were constantly under threat. They were a distraction. He also had more important things to do than spend his days in criminal pursuits. He should be hunting down lost children and bringing them home. She hated his job. And for much the same reason she didn't approve of the sky diving and rock climbing. They were an indulgence. His efforts to keep fit she saw as a failing for a different reason. She believed he was narcissistic – doing it for the sake of his appearance more than anything else. She didn't accept his argument that as an agent he had to keep fit. And she absolutely loathed the fact that he carried a gun.
Thus far she'd been reasonably hands off with him, provided of course that he did everything that she demanded, like bringing difficult teenagers to school. And of course as long as he didn't abuse his limited freedom. But if he stepped out of line there would be consequences. There always were.
Garrick sighed some more, realising that for the next little while he would be in Cassie's sights. The girl might have been the one to mess up, but in doing so she had messed up his life too. Then again, he couldn't completely blame her.
In the end they were nephilim. They had always been screwed.
Chapter Two
Katarinka, Katz to her friends, lay in bed fuming. She hated this place. The bed was hard, the room was small and it all smelled kind of funny. Then there was the fact that she had no idea at all where she was, save that she knew it wasn't the city. And it was dark too. But the darkness of the room was as nothing to the dark places her thoughts were travelling.
It had been a bad day. First that bitch Cassie had shown up from out of nowhere and brought her here. How she'd done that Katz had no idea. Her magic tricks were amazing and maybe a little bit frightening. But more than that they were a problem she could do without.
She'd been happy, kicking with her friends, smoking a little pot and listening to some music. Simply spending her days on the streets, waiting for the phone call from Armando to tell her it was finally time to go to work. She hadn't wanted to go anywhere. And she certainly hadn't wanted to be told off by that stuck up bitch. Who the hell was she to tell her what was right and what was wrong? But before she’d had the chance to say as much Katz had been brought to this crummy house somewhere in suburbia, where she was staying with a muscle bound jerk who was clinically nuts. He'd called the fucking cow an angel after all.
An angel! How the hell could he call her that?! The steroids must have gone to his brain. The bitch was no angel even if she did have some sort of power – incredible power. Actually she had two. In the short time Katz had known her she’d learnt that the woman could teleport and – she rubbed her leg at the thought – she could injure with just a thought. And however she did it, it was enough that Katz knew she was in trouble. She'd have to plan her escape very carefully next time. After, her leg healed.
The sour faced cop had been right about that. But it was probably because he'd told the cow what to do. No, strike that. More likely the bitch had told him what to say before she did it. Because she did believe him about one thing; he wasn't the one in charge.
Despite looking like a shaved gorilla in his white shirt and dark jacket and towering over her, he was just a lackey. Hired muscle. A goon. Still, she supposed she should stay out of his way for a little while. Because he did seem to have some anger management problems. And with fists like his he could do a lot of damage to her if he chose.
Who'd have thought that a few scratches and a broken latch on the bathroom window would have upset him so much? But they had apparently, and while he hadn't yelled at her or hit her, he had kept telling her that the front door had been open. Over and over again he'd kept telling her that. You'd think it was the end of the world from the way he'd gone on and on about it. And his face had turned bright red under that close cropped blanket of dark hair. For a while she'd thought he was going to explode.
What he hadn't understood, what he obviously never would, was that it wasn't about leaving. It was about not being seen when she left. That was the difference between getting caught and escaping. She could have walked out of the front door even if it had been locked; that wasn't an issue. She'd used the bathroom window because she'd guessed that the bitch would be watching the front door. Unfortunately she'd apparently been watching the rest of the house as well.
Katz had barely gotten five feet across the back yard before the bitch had been in front of her, arriving as before from out of nowhere. Running into her had been a pain – literally. One second she'd been making her escape, out on the grass thinking to climb over the back fence and run through the neighbour's yards, and the next the bitch had been standing right in front of her. After that things had gone downhill.
The bitch had crippled her. She still didn't know how. All she did know was that while she'd been standing there in front of her, frantically trying to think of some sort of excuse, her right leg had suddenly started hurting. A lot. Then it had buckled and she'd almost fallen to the ground. And after that as if that wasn't enough, the bloody bitch had made her hobble around to the front of the house and ring the front doorbell. She'd made her tell the no neck brute what she'd done.
The fucking cow was no angel Katz thought, though that she might just be a demon. And she should be in jail. No one had the right to hurt her! But the gorilla was right about one thing. She was too powerful for the cops to deal with. And obviously no jail was going to hold her.
After that it had been dinner and bed for her. Cassie had gone. Vanished as soon as she'd returned her to the muscle bound jerk, who as it turned out was a cop of some sort and armed with a huge cannon under his jacket. Armed and angry. Still, he hadn't shot her, though he no doubt had wanted to. He hadn't been sympathetic though either. Instead he'd fed her, moaned incessantly about his damned window, and told her to get the hell out of his sight when she was done. He was probably still moaning about it in the living room where she could hear the TV playing quietly. But at least he had given up on interrogating her. He hadn't even bothered asking her her name since then. He just kept called her kid.
Clearly he wanted her gone, and she could live with that. She wanted the same thing after all. But it was where she was going that was the problem. Because he wasn't going to take her back to her friends. In the morning he was going to drive her to some school. A boarding school of all places, in the middle of some backwater dump she'd never heard of in Broome County. And there she would undoubtedly be expected to transform into some sort of lady. What a crock! What a miserable pile of shit! She was done with school! And how would Armando be able to find her in the middle of nowhere? The cop was already talking about taking her
phone away. It was spite of course. He was simply angry about his bloody window and she doubted he'd do it. Still, she hoped he didn't guess that she had two.
What neither the cop nor the bitch seemed to understand was that she was rich. Like millionaire rich. She didn't need to stay in a dump like this, sleep in a hard bed, or go to some boarding school for ladies. She could simply live a life of freedom and luxury. As soon as Armando was finished making sure that the scene was safe and the cops weren't on to them, he'd arrange the final job, they'd collect the gold and then they could leave this stinking city. Go somewhere warm where she'd never have to see another junkie or stone cold street again. Where there were no foster parents to beat her. Where she could be with her family.
But she couldn't tell them that. She especially couldn't tell the cop that. He'd go all damned moral on her and talk about stealing and such and make her give it back. He seemed that stupid. He'd probably arrest her too. And she suspected he'd get a kick out of it. As for Cassie, well the bitch would probably permanently cripple her if she guessed. There was something not right in the head with her. As though she wasn't really human, but rather some sort of robot. Something cold, hard and rule bound. She definitely wouldn't understand.
Yet it wasn't as if she planned on robbing any more banks. Or at least, not after this one last job. She wasn't going to become some hardened bank robber. Once or twice was enough. Once she had enough money, that was it. And, it wasn't even as if anyone was going to be hurt by what she was doing. There had been no violence and there would be none. This wasn't an armed hold up with guns and masks. She wouldn't do that. And the banks would replace the stolen money. It might cost them a little bit but they were banks. They had plenty. And as Armando said, they had insurance anyway. There were no victims here.
Still, she could just imagine the cop’s attitude. “Stealing is stealing.” It’s “breaking the law”. Urgh! She could almost hear the stupid words coming out of his mouth. He reminded her of the priests in the orphanage. With their long faces and endless droning on about morals and doing the right thing. They hadn’t been much fun. And this cop was no fun either.
Besides, she reasoned. Even if he did find out it wasn't even as if she'd stolen anything. She hadn't. Armando had done the stealing. All she'd done was open a few doors.
And that was the one thing in all of this weirdness that she couldn't figure out. That she could open any door. They were never locked to her, and she didn't know how that could possibly be. She didn't do anything to make them open. They just opened. Still, it was a useful talent. She had first used it to get into Father Mulroony's brandy, and had soon become popular with the other guys in the orphanage once they realised what she could do. But as strange as it was that she could do that, it was stranger still that the cop should know that she could. Or at least that he knew she could do something that wasn’t quite normal.
Her phone beeped suddenly as it received a text, and instantly Katz forgot her woes and her questions. Instead she smiled for what seemed like the first time in ages. After all, there was only one person it could be. Only one person had the number. And there was only one person she'd been desperately texting.
Armando! Her grandfather. Finally he'd got her messages. And even though she wasn't supposed to speak with him until the fuss had died down or even use his name, she figured he needed to know what had happened. How else would he know where to find her to help her get the money when the time came, and that he needed to help get her out of this place?
But there were still some things she just couldn't tell him. Like how she had been transported to here wherever here was and the pain in her leg. Not because the bitch or the cop would have told her not to, but simply because they were insane. She didn't really believe it had happened herself. So, as she lay there she texted him only the basics. Simply that she'd been picked up by a social worker and that a cop called Garrick was driving her to some damned boarding school in the morning. She didn't even know where it was; just that it was in the country. Then again, since she didn't know where she was either that was probably not a big deal. So she gave him the name of the school and the town it was supposed to be in and left it at that. He could do the rest.
It would have been better to talk, but Armando wouldn't allow that. He had cops and feds chasing him from one end of the country to the other. Texts were safer, especially when they could use code words. Armando was sure his phone calls were being monitored by them. Which was why he changed his phone every few weeks. And why she could never call him grandfather. That relationship had to be hidden.
But thirty years on the run had taught him a few tricks, and if the feds thought they were tracking him, the reality was that he was also tracking them. If they listened to his calls he listened to theirs as well. And sometimes he sent them running in the wrong direction by sending them false messages. He was a thousand times smarter than they were. But then cops were stupid and Federal agents were not much brighter. If they were smarter they'd have better jobs.
It had been a good day when her grandfather had come for her. When he'd heard about her mother being locked away in the nut house and she was being fostered for the thousandth time. It would have been better if he could have come years earlier, but he was a man on the run. She hadn't known that. Her mother had never said anything about him. But then her mother was permanently in and out of care facilities. She was schizophrenic. Which was why Katz had ended up in an orphanage and from there had moved on to a string of foster homes.
And now, thanks to another one of her turns, she was going to be spending five years locked up in one. Criminally insane – that was the phrase the other kids had used. Her mother was criminally insane. Another way of saying that in some delusional fit she'd picked up a knife and attacked another woman. After that of course she'd been arrested, tried and sentenced. Katz wouldn't even get to see her in all that time.
It was unfair really. Her mother had been a certified nutter from before she'd been born. She didn't even know who her father was. The line on her birth certificate was simply blank. It was just some guy she'd slept with during one of her schizo episodes. Whoever he was though he certainly wasn't an angel. That was just nuts. Still if she'd done the decent thing and given her up for adoption Katz could have had a normal life with a good family. Instead, she had been given this half life as she was moved between foster homes, the orphanage and her mother's flat when she was back in the real world.
That had been bad enough. Perfect proof that life was a bitch. Just the same for her as it was for many of her friends. But then when her grandfather – Amando she quickly corrected herself – had turned up she'd discovered a whole new world full of unfairness. The government itself had ruined her life. That was just wrong, and it made her angry.
The government had set her grandfather up and forced him into hiding long ago. Once he'd been an agent himself, until things had gone horribly wrong. He'd been collateral damage in some sort of operation that had gone sideways. And then they'd tried to lock him up for the rest of his life to cover up their own blunders and to keep their secrets hidden. He'd run of course, and kept running ever since. It had forced him into live a life of crime as he couldn’t hold down a paying job with the Feds sniffing around every corner. He couldn't even keep using the same name for more than a few months at a time. It was simply what he had to do just to keep himself alive. Katz thought it was ironic in a bitterly unfair sort of way that her grandfather was now labelled a criminal by the very government that was responsible for forcing him into the situation in the first place. They'd forced him to become the thief he was and then blamed him for it.
She hated them for that. Maybe if they'd played fair her grandfather could have come home long ago and with him there maybe her mother wouldn’t have become the schizophrenic she'd turned into and been locked away for most of her life. Katz could have been raised in a real home with a real family. Of course if life had been fair her father wouldn't have been a one night sta
nd that had disappeared into the night.
Still the government had screwed her. But that was something she could never tell anyone, least of all the cop in the lounge. Not when he was spinning some crazy tale about angels and women being driven insane by sex with them. The guy was a twisted pervert with a badge.
He could also never know that Armando was her grandfather. No one could. If they found out they'd use her as a means to get to him just as they'd used her mother. Leverage. Her life would be in danger. And even though he seemed to be relatively harmless as far as cops went she knew that Garrick would not stop them. In fact he'd probably help them. It would be his duty or whatever.
So she wouldn't tell him about Armando or the text she'd sent or the one she'd just received – it would only upset him. Because in time her grandfather would come for her. Now that he knew the name of the school and the town she knew he would come. It might take a few days or a week or two. But as long as he knew where she was he would come for her. And clearly the message had been received. Because the only thing he sent her back was a single line of text. Just three words.
“I've got you.”
But those three words were all she needed. Finally, she thought as she read and reread that text in the darkness, things were looking up. And the damned cop and the fucking bitch had no clue.
