by Paula Weston
‘Isn’t it just.’
She catches my eye and smiles. We’re still okay. If I was the hugging type, I’d be hugging her right now for not asking me to move out of the bungalow after what happened this week. For letting three half-angels stay.
The pipes in the wall bang. Rafa is in the bathroom. The fact he’s showering here must mean he’s hanging around for a while this morning.
I flick on the kettle and drop a tea bag into a coffee-stained mug. Sunlight streams through the window and glares off the sink and bench. Wait—the sink is clean enough to give off glare?
‘What time did you get up?’ I ask Jason.
He shrugs, not looking around. ‘Early.’
I try to catch Maggie’s eye, but she’s focused on her work again—or trying hard to look like she is. Her fingers form perfect loops as she sews.
‘What are your plans for today?’ She doesn’t look up but I know she’s talking to me.
‘Besides checking in on you?’ Maggie bites her lip; she hates the watch we’ve been keeping on her. ‘Mick Butler’s getting out of hospital this morning,’ I say.
‘Are you meeting him out front with flowers?’
‘Yep, and then I’m taking him out for brunch.’
She laughs, tests the button she’s just stitched on.
‘Rafa wants us to have a chat with him and Rusty at the Imperial.’
Maggie’s slender fingers stall, needle and thread hovering in the air. ‘Please tell me you’re joking.’
‘Sadly, no.’
Mick and Rusty Butler. Pan Beach’s finest dope-growers. I bet they’re wishing they’d listened to Rafa and not forced their way into the middle of the fight between the Rephaim and two of the demons hunting the Fallen. Especially given Bel and Leon brought along two pet hellions for fun. After being savaged by one, there’s a good chance Mick’s going to want a beer at the first opportunity.
The kettle boils. I bring my cup to the table.
‘There’s only one way that’s going to end, Gaby.’ A line creases Maggie’s forehead. ‘You don’t have to go.’
‘Rafa thinks I do.’
‘Since when do you worry about what Rafa thinks?’ She watches me sit down. ‘Please don’t go to the pub. We’re down a waitress this morning—Nicky’s not coming in until lunchtime. You could cover for her.’
‘I need her more than you do,’ Rafa says, coming up the hallway with the newspaper. He walks into the kitchen, pulling on a grey t-shirt. His dark blond hair is damp and sticking up after a rough towel-drying.
‘What?’ he says in response to Maggie’s expression. ‘I might need back-up.’
I give a short laugh at the ridiculousness of that statement. Rafa can take care of Mick and his mates without breaking a sweat; he just wants to throw me into a violent situation and see how I react—see how much more my body remembers.
I don’t know about before, but I know what it remembers now: it remembers Rafa. His bed. His hands. The way he kissed me the other night…My body flares in response to him, and then my mind shuts it down, blocks out all the images of his skin, the green of his eyes that night.
He’s still keeping things from me about the past. Our past. Violence comes to him as easy as breathing. He’s reckless. So why do I still feel safer with him around, even if it means following him into the public bar at the Imperial?
Rafa lifts his shirt to rub a palm across his flat stomach, a lazy gesture. He catches my eye. ‘Sleep well?’
‘Like a baby.’
We both know I’m lying.
‘And you, Margaret?’
‘Like a log, thank you, Rafael.’
Rafa comes further into the kitchen and looks over Jason’s shoulder. ‘If you’re trying to score points with me, Goldilocks, you’d do better with bacon and eggs.’
‘You don’t want any, then?’ Jason asks. He tosses a pancake and catches it in the pan. Maggie forgets herself for a second and smiles.
‘I didn’t say that.’ Rafa pulls up a stool at the bench and unfolds the paper. ‘So, where did you get to last night?’ he asks Jason.
Maggie and I share a quick look and go back to our respective tasks. I dunk my tea bag. Maggie keeps sewing.
‘I was on the couch.’
‘No, you weren’t. Not until midnight—I heard you get back. Where did you go?’
‘I had a few errands to run.’
‘Like what?’
‘Not everything is your business, Rafa.’
Rafa’s hands go still on the paper. ‘You’re joking, right?’ Jason doesn’t respond.
‘Like it was none of my business you’re one of us? Or that you’re the reason Jude and Gabe disappeared last year?’
Jason fusses with the pan, keeps his back to Rafa.
‘You came and went all day yesterday, and now you disappear for half the night. Given all the bombshells you’ve dropped this week—’
‘I’m trying to find Dani and Maria.’
Maggie and I look at each other. Is Jason going to tell him the truth?
Rafa already knows Jason’s mother survived Nathaniel’s round-up of Rephaite babies and that she later had another child, Arianna, a human girl, with gifts. Rafa knows Dani is a descendant of Arianna and is also gifted; that she can see the Rephaim. He knows it was Dani who told Jason I was still alive, who saw Rafa tracking me through the rainforest when he turned up a week ago. And he knows Dani had a vision that prompted Jason to reach out to Jude and me a year ago. That she then vanished with us and reappeared the following day with no memory of what had happened to us.
What Rafa doesn’t know is why Jason is looking for Dani and her mother now.
‘And?’ Rafa says.
‘And nothing. I haven’t found them. They still won’t take my calls.’
‘The kid knows more than she’s admitting.’
Jason turns around. ‘Dani doesn’t remember what happened last year. How many times do I have to tell you?’
Rafa flattens the newspaper. ‘They’re hiding something and you can’t or won’t see it. You’re blinded by misplaced loyalty.’
‘They’re not hiding anything.’ The pan bangs on the stove. ‘Dani’s twelve. She has a gift any Rephaite, angel or demon would exploit in a heartbeat. Maria is protecting her only child.’
I go to the sink on the pretext of putting my tea bag in the bin.
‘So, that’s what you’ve been doing when you’re not here, looking for them?’ Rafa says. ‘How do you know where to look if you don’t know where they are?’
‘Let it go,’ I say to Rafa, blocking his view.
‘In a minute.’ He leans sideways to see around me. ‘Are you going to tell me if they call?’
‘That depends.’
‘On what?’
‘When you trust me, I’ll trust you.’
Rafa runs his palm over his jaw. They watch each other.
Yeah, that’s not happening any time soon.
Jason turns back to the pancakes. ‘Not everyone is your enemy, Rafa,’ he says, quieter now.
‘No,’ Rafa mutters, ‘just people related to you.’
I catch his eye. ‘I’m related to him.’
Maggie puts her sewing away and I help her scoop the buttons back into the jar. The promise of pancakes, blueberries and maple syrup is enough to get Rafa sitting at the table with us. It’s not enough to take the tension from Jason’s shoulders.
And for good reason.
What Jason is keeping from Rafa has to come out. Today.
TALKING TO A BRICK WALL
Can you decapitate someone with a pool cue?
I hope not, or I’m in a shitload of trouble. Our chat with Mick and Rusty isn’t going well.
Mick’s on a stool, propped against the bar, his neck and shoulder heavily bandaged. Half his scruffy beard is missing where medics had to stitch up his throat two nights ago. Anyone else would have tidied up the rest of it, but he’s left it hanging down to his chest. He looks strangely fra
il under the insipid bar lights: the stubble on his head is stark against his pallid scalp. Even the ink on his neck and arms looks tired.
His brother sits beside him. Rusty’s beard is intact but his buzz-cropped hair is interrupted by a square, white bandage behind his left ear, held in place with surgical tape.
‘Tell me where I can find it,’ Mick says for about the fifth time. ‘I’m gonna mount its fat head on my wall.’
‘You really want to talk about this here?’ Rafa asks.
Mick eyeballs him. ‘You think I’d hide this from them?’ He gestures to the four guys around us. All pierced and tattooed, in threadbare jeans and blue singlets. One has three studs in each eyebrow. Woosha. Another, a tattoo of the Southern Cross on his throat. Tank. I don’t know the other two. But I don’t doubt for a second they could snap the pool cues they’re holding in half with their bare hands. We’re unarmed. The Imperial might be rough, but someone would have noticed if we’d walked in with katanas.
A week ago, I didn’t know what a katana was. Now I’m starting to feel naked without one. Who knew I could get so attached to a sword?
‘Let it go,’ Rafa says.
‘Are you serious?’ Mick points an oil–stained finger at his neck. ‘That thing fucking bit me.’
‘And that thing is dead.’
I glance around the bar. It’s half ten on a Friday and the place is deserted except for us and a couple of old guys nursing schooners on faded beer mats. The place reeks of stale beer, cigarettes and regret.
The story going around town is that the Butlers smoked too much of the heavy-duty weed they grow up the mountain and were savaged by feral cats. But Mick and Rusty know we saw what attacked them.
‘So you reckon,’ Mick says. ‘How do I know you’re—’
‘I saw its severed head,’ I say. ‘Trust me, it’s dead.’
Mick eyes me. ‘Who got it? The one with the scar, or the bloodnut?’
He means Ez—Esther—and Uriel. Two of the Rephaim who’d been fighting each other until the demons and hellions turned up.
‘Ez killed it.’
‘What about the other one?’ Mick presses. ‘Someone get that?’
‘Not your problem,’ Rafa says.
‘Pig’s arse. Those pricks came into our territory. There’s no way someone’s not paying.’
Rafa has one boot resting on a barstool. His shoulders are relaxed, but I know how quickly he can explode into violence. And he’s been itching for a fight ever since Tuesday—quiet moments in my bed aside.
He meets my eyes briefly and then turns back to Mick. ‘Outside.’ He moves towards the beer garden before Mick can argue. I’m a step behind.
‘Ready?’ Rafa says.
‘Keep your temper and I won’t have to be.’ I don’t want to fight. I might have held my own when my life and Maggie’s depended on it, but I’m not as confident as Rafa that I can switch this stuff on and off.
And this time I don’t have a sword.
The beer ‘garden’ is empty. It’s a slab of concrete under a corrugated-iron roof with a few aluminium tables and benches bolted into the ground. Plastic chairs are scattered around. A pool table in the middle looks as though it was dragged out from the bar a few years ago, and has barely a scrap of felt left on it. It’s warm out here; the sea breeze blocked by a high wall.
In the nine months I’ve been in Pan Beach I’ve never once had the desire to step inside the Imperial. It’s the last bastion of the old seaside town Pan Beach once was, a place for the dwindling minority of locals who prefer tap beer, pies and worn carpet over fusion brews, tapas and polished timber. But it’s not the menu or the decor that puts me off. It’s the clientele. There’s almost as much blood spilled here on a Friday night as there is beer.
Mick shuffles into the garden, wincing, but trying to hide how much the bite on his neck hurts. Rusty puts a hand out to support him. Mick waves him away, lowers himself onto a bench.
‘I wanna know what bit me.’
Woosha and Tank station themselves at the door. The other two position themselves between us and the gate to the street. Rafa doesn’t seem bothered that the gate’s padlocked and we’re surrounded. I’m not quite so relaxed.
‘Those mutants, they’re part of a military experiment, right? Playing around with DNA and that shit?’
I stare at Mick. This is what he’s come up with over the past two days? But then a government conspiracy makes more sense than the truth: that he was attacked by a hell-beast. How else to explain the huge creatures with jaundiced eyes and deadly claws? I don’t want to lie, but I can’t tell them the truth either. Way too hard.
‘I can’t say.’
Rafa is half-sitting on the edge of a table scarred with graffiti and cigarette burns, enjoying watching me dig myself into a hole.
‘Can’t or won’t?’ Mick says.
‘Both.’
His eyes narrow. ‘I knew it. What did I tell you, Woosha?’
‘Who were the freaks with the white hair?’ Rusty asks.
The warmth of the day recedes at the mention of Bel and Leon. I remember the fear in Maggie’s eyes. The moment where everything around us turned quiet, when the splintered Rephaim stopped fighting each other and turned, shoulder to shoulder, to look at what was coming out of the dark. I can’t quite shake Bel’s boasting that he put his sword through my neck. Or what he said when I asked what happened to Jude. Come with us, and we will show you.
‘Had to be government spooks,’ Mick says.
‘They didn’t look government.’
‘They’re spooks, dickhead, they’re not supposed to.’
Rusty gestures at me. ‘Why were they so interested in you?’
I pull myself out of the clearing in the forest, rub the chill from my arms. ‘I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like you.’ I shift my hair from my shoulder to show them the hellion bite near my collarbone.
Rusty’s breath comes out in a hiss. ‘When did that happen?’
‘A few months back.’ A lie, but it’s not as if I can tell him it happened a few nights ago when I gave myself up to Daniel and the Sanctuary to get Maggie back—not given how advanced the healing is. Rusty would notice: he’s a bit more of a thinker than his brother.
‘It was one of those mutants? Why?’
‘They think I’m someone I’m not.’ It’s close enough to the truth.
Mick spits a wad of phlegm on the concrete at my feet. ‘Bullshit.’
Charming.
‘Excuse me? You think I did this to myself?’
‘No, sweetheart, I think you’re full of crap about how it happened. You’ve done nothing but feed us fairytales since you walked in the door. We saw you.’
‘Saw us what?’ Rafa eases his weight off the table.
‘Playing ninjas up there.’
‘And?’
‘And start talking. Now.’ The men surrounding us step closer with their pool cues.
Rafa laughs. ‘Listen, moron, this is a courtesy visit. Your fight’s done. Let it go. If you get caught up in this, there won’t be enough left of any of you to leave a stain.’ I shoot Rafa a warning look, which he ignores.
Mick’s face flushes. He’d be throwing punches by now if he wasn’t in so much pain. ‘You must have a death wish, mate, coming in here like this.’
‘I’m trying to save your worthless arse.’ Rafa is clear of the table now, flexing his fingers. Our window for a nonviolent chat just closed.
Woosha, Tank and the other two close in around Rafa. ‘You should’ve brought your sword,’ Mick says as the four men rush Rafa.
They swing at his head and legs with surprising precision. The pool cues smack against his forearms and shins as he blocks each strike. Rafa grabs one and jerks it closer, pulling Woosha off his feet and into the path of another swinging cue, which cracks across Woosha’s shoulders. Rafa shoves him at Tank and they sprawl to the ground. Then he king-hits the third guy and throws a chair at the fourth.
&nb
sp; A movement at the door catches my eye: the bartender with his white t-shirt stretched across his stomach. The door slams shut and a bolt slides across on the inside.
Rafa stretches his neck from shoulder to shoulder, waiting for Mick’s crew to get up. ‘You planning on helping out any time today?’ he says to me.
I’ve moved out of the way, my heart rate climbing. Rafa doesn’t need me—he can end this whenever he wants to. He’s keeping this going because he wants to see what I can do.
Before Rafa came to town I would have run from a bar fight at the Imperial without hesitation. Now I don’t know what to do. I’m not the same girl I was a week ago, trying to run through my grief on the rainforest track. But I’m not the other me either. Gabe. One of the Rephaim’s best fighters. The things Rafa says I’m capable of…I’ve only seen them in fits and starts. I might not be able to die here—unless you really can decapitate someone with a pool cue—but I can still get seriously hurt.
What if I can’t fight? It’s one thing to throw a punch in a split-second of rage. This is something else.
Woosha is up from the ground, pulling a knife from his jeans. Mick’s standing now, gripping the side of the pool table. Rusty is watching the fight closely but doesn’t step in. Definitely the smarter of the pair.
Woosha feints left and then right, waiting for the others to surround Rafa again. Tank snaps his cue over his thigh and spins the two halves like batons.
‘Mick.’ I try to sound reasonable. ‘You need to end this before they get hurt.’
He doesn’t even look at me. ‘Shut her up,’ he says absently to Rusty.
Rusty snaps his fingers to get my attention and puts his finger to his lips. Then he turns back to the main action, more interested in the promise of Rafa getting stabbed.
Woosha lunges. Rafa catches him by the wrist and spins him around. He uses his body to block another cue strike and then flings him aside. Woosha hits the concrete hard, grunts. Rafa makes short work of the other two, then gestures for Tank to come at him with his busted cue. Tank grazes Rafa’s arm before Rafa takes his legs out from under him.
Woosha is circling Rafa again, spinning the knife, waiting for his opening. My breath shortens as he glimpses me over his shoulder and turns, slashing the blade.
