Kreios remembered his dearly purchased training involving the Brotherhood in close combat in the heavens. “You know we cannot face them and win. They sap our power the nearer we get to them. The only way to achieve victory is to fight them one at a time. Pick them apart, alone and unaware. We must use speed. We must be even more cunning and merciless than they.” The Brotherhood always fought in pairs: a Brother—a demon—and a host, a man. If divided, they could be killed easily, but together it was much more challenging. This was why the Brothers inexorably sought out new hosts, for while their power was augmented when joined, their hosts became dead husks all too quickly, requiring the Brother parasites to move on to their next suckling feast.
Kreios was unique among pureblood angels, being able to heal from nearly any wound. But since the Sword of Light had been lost to him, when the Brotherhood were near, this ability was retarded at best, impotent at worst. The strategy he had inevitably settled upon as a captain of the fallen host was to fight the Brotherhood in small groups, try to kill the demons, the monsters, the Brothers, fast—the men afterward. Then he would hide until he had enough time to heal, and begin the skirmishing cycle again.
“We must fight smarter, Zedkiel. We must be opportunistic and ensnare them, separate them from their partners.” Kreios stood, and as he did so, he withdrew from his pack the long, shrouded object. “And we must put to use what has now returned to my hand.” He unwrapped the object, holding it out parallel to the ground. It shimmered like water wherever the light caught it, an invisible weapon suspended in its scabbard on the fingertips of an angel.
Zedkiel stood in reverence and whispered, “Where did you find that?” His eyes were large and round as he realized he was looking at the Sword of Light.
“I did not tell you. I have recovered it. For many cycles of the sun, I tracked the wretch who took it from me. When the time was right, I took it back.” It was plain that Kreios had spilled blood in the act. The blade of the Sword was sheathed, concealed, its scabbard reflecting its surroundings, rendering the Sword invisible in all but firelight.
Kreios took hold of the grips of the Sword and slowly pulled it from its sheath. The room filled with light as he held it up, and it was so bright that the rock walls of Zedkiel’s house appeared translucent. Zedkiel shielded his eyes; the Sword shone with the brilliance of the sun. Kreios touched the blade, a war maker, and said in hushed tones, “The Sword of Light.”
He turned to his kinsman. “With this, we shall wage war. With this, we shall defend our realm. We shall defend what is ours.” His eyes burned black fire.
CHAPTER XII
Boise, Idaho—Present Day
PEOPLE WERE RUSHING OUT through the concession lobby toward the ticketing area when Kim and I exited the ladies’ room. We stopped and held on to each other and stared as worried faces hurried by, ignoring us. One crowd of girls knocked over a cardboard promo display as they ran. They didn’t look back. I heard a woman’s scream burst out from somewhere, perhaps down one of the corridors, and then there were cops everywhere, one hand on their holstered guns, telling people to be calm and orderly. Through the glass of the lobby windows, I could see the blue-and-red strobes of several police cruisers. They had pulled right up onto the sidewalk. One of the cops carried what looked to me like a military gun, something huge and scary that belonged in the hands of a soldier, not with a patrol man.
Michael found us in the lobby and asked if I was okay. “What happened?” He acted like he was more excited than scared. “Did you see anything?”
“I saw everything. He did it right in front of God and everyone.”
“What did you see, Airel?” Michael asked, hunting for gory details I wouldn’t give. I pressed my fingers into my temples, trying to force my Technicolor mental snapshots of the event to flee from me. It didn’t help. All it did was conjure a bloody knife in my mind’s eye. My trauma was as invasive as the sound a man’s footsteps had made on the tile floor of the ladies’ room.
The police held everyone in the ticketing lobby, having locked down the theater so they could question everyone, including some people who had been watching other movies. They were calling certain people out of the crowd—exclusively tall, white males—and pulling them aside to a place I couldn’t see. Somebody identified the killer. I wasn’t sure if that made me feel better or worse; I couldn’t say it had all been a horrific nightmare now.
They interviewed me too. I told them everything that had happened, even the part where he had followed me into the bathroom. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. It felt like the world was running on its own time and I had been ejected from reality, caught in my own slow and haunting version of it.
The cops told me to wait for a few minutes—the officer in charge wanted to have a word with me. Great. James and Kim and Michael milled around with me as nearly everyone else was released and gradually allowed to clear out. The police had done the best they could. Even though they’d locked down the building in an attempt to trap the killer, I knew he was long gone.
I could feel it.
I was unsafe.
“You are one lucky girl,” the officer said, walking up to me. This must be Mr. In Charge. He was big, bordering on heavy, and deep-set dark eyes looked at me from under a heavy unibrow. He flipped his notebook shut, mumbling something to another uniformed cop.
Lucky? I thought how unlucky I was to have been subjected to all of it, but then again, I was alive. And that was something.
“We need you to come down to the station to meet with a sketch artist. You can ...”
“I’ll take her,” Michael said. I didn’t argue. I thought it was a good idea, me not driving.
“Sorry, miss,” the officer said. “You’ll be riding with us, please. It’s for your protection. We still haven’t apprehended the suspect. Detective Lopez would be more comfortable with you in custody.”
I made a face. In custody? This is getting real. But what could I do? I just nodded to him. Increasingly now, things were happening to me, and without my active consent. I started to hand my car keys to Kim, but Michael intercepted them. “We’ll follow you,” he said, “and wait till you’re done.”
“You don’t have to come. I’ll be fine.”
Kim rolled her eyes and said, “We’re coming.”
The big policeman practically commanded me to call my parents, so I tried to find a private corner and then dropped the bomb over the phone. Boy, that was fun. My mom was freaking out, in tears. When I finally convinced her I hadn’t been raped or worse and was able to hang up the phone, it wasn’t five minutes until Dad called. Of course she had called him and probably made him think I was still in mortal danger. I could tell he was ready to kill somebody. I told him not to worry, that I would be safe at home with Mom in a few hours, but he insisted he would meet me at the police station. He said he wasn’t far, that he could get there within an hour.
Actually, that made me feel a lot better. As often as he was gone, I was glad he would be the one taking me safely home at the end of the day. “Dad,” I said, “it’s fine. I’m okay. Besides, I’m the only one who saw him, so I kinda have to go down and like, give a statement or something.” I hoped I wouldn’t just burst out into a big fat blubbering mess in front of everyone. It felt so good to hear his voice. There was strength in it, and I needed that.
“Well … I’ll see you there, kiddo,” he said.
“Dad,” I growled at him.
He hung up and I breathed a sigh of relief. When parents say you’ll always be their baby, they’re not kidding. I didn’t mind him calling me “kiddo” so much, as long as it wasn’t in front of my friends. On a day like this, though, there were exceptions. I wanted nothing more than to be a kiddo, home safe with my family.
***
MR. IN CHARGE, OF the Unibrow Tribe, made awkward small talk as he drove me to the station in his cruiser. I felt like a prisoner in the back seat. Like a perp. The police band radio crackled every now and then with a code langu
age I could only guess at, and it hit me that the world was a big, mean place that I scarcely understood at seventeen years old. My peers and I sometimes swaggered around like we knew, pretending to be all grown up. But we had no idea.
I could picture this cop with a cup of coffee in one hand and a doughnut in the other; he fit the stereotype. Even his voice sounded garbled and fat, like he had a doughnut in there already, fighting to either get out or go down. But fat boy was driving a pretty hot car, a brand-new Dodge Charger. The incongruence was weird.
I thought about how clichés are cliché for a reason, but that sometimes stuff doesn’t make sense. I had always expected my life to be original, that I really would change the world by going against the grain with every possible decision I could make. But life throws curve balls, and what we expect will be the last thing to happen—because it’s cliché, because it’s been done to death—is the thing that ends up getting us in the end. What we see is not what we get. Overweight, balding cop on one hand, sexy new car on the other. I didn’t get the real world, whatever that was supposed to be.
Where do I fit into this mess?
***
“JUST THIS WAY, MISS.” I followed Unibrow back to a cramped office that looked rather stripped and depressing. There was one skinny window through which I could see a mangy brown lawn and part of the cracked blacktop of the parking lot. A single metal desk, a solitary chair standing behind it, and me. Standing and waiting.
A few minutes later, a man came in with a chair for me and introduced himself. “I’m Detective Lopez.” He looked like a normal person, not a cop, the way he dressed.
I sat down and he took his seat behind the desk. “What are you, like, the vice squad or something? Undercover?”
“21 Jump Street, actually.” He chuckled. I realized he had expected to get a laugh out of me, which made it awkward.
“I don’t know what that is,” I said.
“Right,” he said. “You’re what, fifteen?”
“Seventeen.” I glared at him a little.
“Seventeen. Anyway, looks like you got gypped.” He dropped a thin file folder flat on the desk. “You went for comedy but got horror instead.” He slapped his thigh this time, smiling broadly.
“Pretty lame joke, considering the day I’ve had.” But I smiled. He had a comforting way about him, like he had a family of his own, like he was a dad to someone.
“I’m sorry.” Embarrassment dimmed his eyes a moment. “Just trying to lighten the mood for you.” His smile was reassuring, and I could see in his dark brown eyes that he cared. Either that or he was just really good at his job.
We went over everything that had happened step by step. What I saw, what I heard, everything. My heart sped up when I told him about that horrific scene in the bathroom, and I felt nauseated again but controlled it.
Detective Lopez took me down the hall to the sketch artist, a reticent woman with glasses and wispy black hair. “Now,” he said, “I know it was dark, but what can you tell us about him? Was he tall, short, fat, thin, scars, weird looks? Anything you can think of will help.”
“He was tall with blond hair…” As I gave the description, the artist began her work. After getting the basic shape of his face, she began to sketch the eyes. Even on paper, they still cut right through me.
I felt unsafe again. What if he tries to find me?
She continued her work, filling in the details, making corrections, adding features, thickening the nose, thinning the eyebrows, squaring the chin. When she finished, I was amazed. The sketch looked just like the man I had seen in the theater.
“That’s him.” I felt sick to my stomach again.
After that, Detective Lopez confirmed my contact information and said I could go. I almost didn’t want to. As I walked toward the waiting area, my limbs felt numb, my mind wasted and useless. I saw Michael and Kim and James waiting for me, bored silly. I began to smile. And then, as I was hugging Kim, my dad walked in the front door.
“Airel,” he said, hurrying toward me.
“Dad.” I held on to him and would not let go.
He smoothed my hair out of my eyes and enfolded me in the vise of his arms, saying, “It’s okay, kiddo. It’s okay. Daddy’s got you. Daddy’s got you now.”
“I’m fine, Dad, really,” I lied, still holding tightly to him.
“You sure? Kim filled me in.” His eyes said what he would not as he pulled back to look at me: “You could have been killed.” The fear on his face passed like a twitch, but I had seen it nevertheless. I hugged him again. He told me Mom was home making dinner, busying herself to keep from worrying.
I looked into my dad’s eyes and said, “I want to go home.” Over his shoulder, I caught Michael’s eye. He was standing a few feet away, staring at me. I blushed and he turned away. I wondered what he was thinking.
“Well, I’m just glad you’re okay, sweetheart.” Dad pulled back and looked at me. “Didn’t use any of your kickboxing skills, did you?”
I sighed melodramatically. “Really? We’re going there, right here, right now?”
He smiled. “I just wanted to know if it was money well spent.”
I rolled my eyes. “Thanks, Daddy.” Can we please not have this argument again, especially in front of Michael Alexander? “You did want a boy.”
Dad curled his strong arm around my shoulder, taking me toward the car, and all I could think about was how glad I was to have him.
CHAPTER XIII
IT WAS GREAT TO have Dad home, especially now when I needed both him and Mom the most. He’d probably be gone on another sales trip again soon, but it was nice knowing he was here after the day from hell. Kim and I had said goodbye to our “dates,” if we really could call them that, in the parking lot at the police station. Kim was staying the night with us. I told her I would hate her forever if she didn’t, so she called her mom and told her I needed my Kimmie tonight and that was that.
The “dinner” Mom had been making for us turned out to be take-and-bake pizza, which was fine with me. We ended up pigging out on pizza and popcorn and watching Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday—one of my faves—just the four of us. Mom and Dad and Kim sat on the couch, and I sat on the floor while Kim did up my hair in all kinds of different braids, trying on different looks. It was good therapy.
Eventually my parents kissed me and trundled off up the stairs to bed, yawning, leaving Kim and me to talk. This was what I had been waiting for all day. Girl time with my one and only bud.
“So Kim,” I said, “talk to me. Tell me about your all-star quarterback boyfriend James.” I jumped up and sat next to her on the couch, drawing my legs up under me.
“No way. Besides, you know you wanna go first, princess.”
“Princess?” I said with disgust. Then I belched loudly, the result of too much pepperoni and soda pop in one day. “Agh,” I growled, “I needed that. Been holding it in too long.”
Kim laughed. “Dude. Don’t change the subject. You know you’re all about the L to the O to the V to the E.” She made her fingers into letters.” You’re totally crushing on Michael. Don’t deny it.”
I gasped. “Look who’s talking, Little Miss Check Me Out. The last time I saw you as glassy eyed as you were today was when Second Chance Dresses had their going out of business sale. Except James isn’t exactly 85% off. He’s all man, isn’t he?” I punched her in the arm.
“Ow,” she shouted. It was obviously too loud and she collapsed into a laughing fit, snorting like a pig as she tried to breathe, which only made it worse for both of us.
Finally we calmed down. “Kimmie, I love you.”
She looked at me very seriously. “I love you too, Airel.” She closed her eyes and pouted her lips, slowly leaning in toward me.
I laughed and pushed her away. “Stop it.”
“Oh, pardon me,” she said. “I forgot. Airel’s lips are only for Michael.”
I tried a little laugh, but it fizzled and died and then my smile followed suit.
It was suddenly very quiet.
Kim broke the silence. “Oh, my gosh.” she said, pretending to be outraged. “You didn’t kiss him.”
“Kim, no. Jeez. Of course not.”
“Liar.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Li-arrr,” she sang.
“Kim, I didn’t kiss him. I promise. Would I do something like that, anyway?”
“Oh, come on.”
“You know what, no. I didn’t kiss him.” I paused. “But I won’t say I didn’t want to.”
“Uh-huh. Gorrr-geouuus,” she sang again, much to my annoyance.
“Kim, I haven’t—I mean, not since … I haven’t felt this way. Ever.” Saying it out loud made it sound momentous, even revolutionary, and that changed things. “Crap.”
“That’s right. Crap. Which means I’m right. You’re in trouble. Because you’re totally in love with a guy you don’t even know,” she said, her smile spreading from ear to ear. “It’s all over your face.”
I tried not to smile and blush, but that just made it worse. “Kim, that’s not possible. How could I be in love? And you’re right, I just met the guy.”
“So? That doesn’t matter, Airel. Not when it’s real, like this.”
“Real? How is this—I mean, how can you tell? How would you know?”
“How would I know? Thanks a lot. I’ll tell you how. It’s because I watch lots of movies. It’s love at first sight. You and Michael are Maria and Tony in West Side Story.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Let’s see,” she said, counting the movies off on her fingers, “You’re Bianca and Cameron in 10 Things I Hate About You. You’re Cady and Aaron in Mean Girls.”
“I am so not Lindsay Lohan.”
She gasped, lighting up with a fresh idea. “You’re Ariel and Prince Eric in The Little Mermaid. Oh, my gosh.” Her eyes flashed, devious. “Except she can’t spell or pronounce her name right, of course.”
I sniggered. I’d been the butt of mermaid jokes my whole life. “I assume you have a point, Kim?”
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