by Debra Dunbar
Hot damn. “Let’s do this thing!”
In a flash we were somewhere else—somewhere with the humidity of a sauna and more bugs than a cornfield in August. I swayed, hit with the vertigo I always felt when someone besides me did the teleportation, and tried to make sense of my surroundings. “Where are we?”
“That doesn’t matter. Meet me in Sadiya, India.”
“Wait, isn’t that the place with all the spiders?” He was gone, and I was shouting to a tree with ropey vines hanging from it.
It took me six tries, but I finally managed to get to Sadiya. It was oddly beautiful. Trees were covered in webs like giant white cotton candy. Mini canopies of filaments covered nearby fields.
“Barranco, Peru.”
And he was gone before I had a chance to say ‘hi’ or even catch my breath. That’s how it went so many times that I lost count. My mind numbed, and I stopped thinking about where I was supposed to go. I stopped visualizing it, concentrating, trying to lock onto Gregory’s energy signature. I just heard the words and let them sink into some primal part of me. And then I went.
A swirling mass of sand, and his hands reached out to touch mine. I felt his pride, and I realized with the last four locations I’d gone right away, by instinct.
“Forty-nine,” he told me. “One more.”
I heard the words and threw myself there before it completely sunk into my brain where I’d sent myself. I couldn’t breathe, every bit of water in my body freezing and crushing under massive gravitational pressure. I panicked and leaped from my physical form as it shattered, gripping Gregory’s spirit-form with my own.
Asshole. You fucking asshole. He’d scared the crap out of me. Living inside a dead body, pond scum, or even a flame was something I’d managed to cope with. Bodies exploding wasn’t. The last time I’d had that sensation, I’d been unable to recreate a physical form and had nearly died. Even with Gregory beside me, the memory still sent me down terror lane.
You need to think fast, Cockroach. An Angel of Chaos acts from instinct.
Think fast. Stop hiding under rocks. Accept my responsibility. What a pain in the ass this angel was. I did think fast. I got here in one try. I ditched the human body and grabbed onto you with all of my spirit-being.
I felt him hold me tighter. I’m not always available to cling to .
Yeah, I knew that. And I understood the underlying message. I needed to up my game. Teleportation was evidently not the only lesson I was to learn today. I might be less than one-thousand years old, but my young age wouldn’t spare me if some ancient angel, demon, or drop bear wanted to take me out. There was no do-over in this life. I needed to have the skills of an ancient, or not live to celebrate my first millennium.
You seriously told me to meet you at Uranus . I made the spirit-being equivalent of a snort. My anus? How can that be? I don’t even have an anus at the moment.
Uranus. The planet. I thought it was a valid choice since you were considering Mars.
He didn’t get the joke. It was one of the things I loved about my angel. He made such a great straight-man.
We’re hanging on the surface of your anus; your cold, cold anus.
Ah, a pun. Although surface is a bit of a misnomer. There is no solid surface, as this is a gaseous planet. The elements that make up this celestial body are held together by significant gravitational pull.
Your anus is gaseous. I was pretty close to hysterics over this whole thing. This situation brought out the teenage boy in me.
Very funny. His spirit-self caressed mine. Fifty places and quite an improvement. Where are we to meet this weekend, my Cockroach?
I saw my surroundings through the lens of my spirit-being. It was a stunning mix of colors and textures. There were moons above the cloud canopy, and a compressed surface of frozen gas far below. It was amazing, and I never would have dared venture here without Gregory by my side.
I want to ride a comet.
Fun. That’s an excellent and very unexpected choice.
I couldn’t wait. A comet. With my angel. Merging my spirit-self slightly with his, I realized I truly couldn’t wait. Perhaps we can return home in a little while and enjoy some time on your anus? I teased.
Chapter 19
We popped back into my living room, which was surprisingly quiet given the number of household members living there. I had no idea where Nils was tonight. Nyalla had clearly shown more patience than I’d given her credit for and still was at the mall. Dalmai, no doubt, was still smoothing the stable floors with the piece of two-inch-by-two-inch square of sandpaper I’d provided him with earlier today.
Our interlude off-planet only made me want to spend more time with Gregory, to seize this brief moment between our duties and pretend nothing existed beyond us. “So... wanna get naked on the couch and play hide-and-seek with the TV remote?”
Gregory shot me a heart-stopping grin and headed for the couch. “Only if we can watch that male masochistic bonding movie you were discussing last week.”
Fight Club. I was really looking forward to Gregory’s commentary. He was a movie talker, I’d discovered. Since I’d already seen these movies a million times, I found it endearing.
“Deal.” I wondered if Uriel’s penance involved bloody fistfights. In a ridiculously long life filled with mind-numbing rules where any sensation was frowned upon, I would certainly want to get punched in the face a few times. Demons understood. Sometimes you just needed to feel, and pain was a good reminder that you were alive in spite of all the four-nine-five reports. Hopefully Gregory would get the metaphor.
We never got to Tyler Durbin. My phone rang just as I was pulling the popcorn out of the microwave. Anyone else I would have sent to voice mail, but it was Nyalla. I was expecting her to tell me she was bored and going to come home and take up nursing, but, instead, I heard her excited voice with crashes and screams sounding in the background.
“Sam? You’ve got to get down here. You’re not going to believe this.”
“Believe what?” Did a demon come through the gate and start wrecking the place? Was there a riot in Columbia over a half-price sale?
“I’m still at the mall. Come quick.”
She hung up, and I stared at the phone. “Good thing you’re here.” I told Gregory. “I need a taxi, and I don’t want to rely on my new-and-improved teleportation skills right now.”
“I take it we will be having rain checks for the Bludgeon Combat movie?” The angel snagged a few pieces of popcorn.
“Yeah. It seems in spite of my best efforts, Nyalla has found herself in trouble.”
When bad shit goes down, it’s good to have an archangel by your side. We appeared in the mall, and before I regained my equilibrium, Gregory threw me to the side into a display of decorative throw pillows. I landed in just the right position to see him take a refrigerator to the chest with enough impact to drive him through the exterior wall and into the parking lot.
I took a split second to process the amount of force that sort of action would take then turned with great caution to see what the fuck was throwing appliances at the speed of sound. Another troll? A giant? Godzilla?
The mall was wrecked. Clothes lay in heaps, some of them smoldering. Metal racks were bent and warped. Broken bits of glass and plastic blended with drywall dust all over the floor. Judging from the labels on the throw pillows, we were in Macy’s. It was difficult to tell, because the entire store was blown wide open, the sun shining through cracks in the roof and holes in the exterior walls besides the one Gregory and the refrigerator had just made.
Beyond that I saw nothing capable of launching an appliance with that kind of trajectory. A few humans were running and screaming, trying to navigate their way out of the store through the jagged rebar-lined impromptu exits. Whatever had thrown the Frigidaire must have done it from a considerable distance.
I extricated myself from the throw pillows, wondered how far Gregory had been thrown, and when he might make a reappearance, and look
ed about for Nyalla. It was a big mall. She could be anywhere. I didn’t see her, but I did see something small moving near what used to be the jewelry section. I edged closer, wary of drop bears attacking me from the ceiling. Or the floor. Just because they liked to leap on prey out of trees didn’t mean they wouldn’t adapt to grabbing my ankles from behind the smashed faux-pearl counter.
It wasn’t a drop bear. It was something equally cute, but far less nefarious. A kitten.
The little grey ball of fluff looked up at me with yellow-green eyes and meowed plaintively. I’m not normally a cat person. I mean, they taste okay if you marinate them for a few days and throw them in the smoker, but other than that and the usual rodent control, they’re not my thing. This little guy was cute, though. How the fuck had a kitten gotten into the mall? Some little kid must have smuggled it in and lost it during the mayhem.
“Here, kitty, kitty.” Even though my intentions, this time, were pure, the cat must have somehow sensed I’d eaten a few of his ancestors in the past. With a twitch of his tail, he hissed and vanished into a pile of purses.
Normally I wouldn’t have bothered, but the purses were on fire. And they were designer. If I was lucky, I’d find an undamaged Louis Vuitton in my search for the kitten. Luck was not on my side. The purses were trashed, and the little gray ball of fluff dashed away just as I reached for him.
“Come on, damn it. We’ve got to get you out of here before another fridge comes flying through the air.” An angel could survive that sort of thing, but this little thing couldn’t. And where the fuck was Gregory anyway? Had the refrigerator knocked him all the way into Glen Burnie?
“Here, kitty, kitty.” It was perched on top of a pile of rubble, near one of the entrances, shaking its head and pawing the broken rebar as it made adorable little spitting-sneezing noises.
I crept closer. The cat turned to me and hissed, arching its back and baring sharp little teeth. Whatever. It was a kitten, and tiny little bite marks wouldn’t exactly kill me. I tried to look non-threatening as I reached out a hand to it. The cat coughed, a cloud of red spraying from its mouth. Shit. This thing needed a vet pronto. I wonder if it had been injured in all the destruction, or had some horrible kitty disease. I took another step. The cat growled. Nyalla rounded one of the remaining intact walls, running toward me with what looked like a nine iron in her hand.
“Sam!”
I grimaced and waved at her to stop. I was only a few feet from the kitten, and I didn’t want it to be spooked.
“Sam, no!” Nyalla ran faster. The cat did a quick back and forth between us. Then Nyalla swung the golf club and sent the little grey ball of fluff flying clear into the lingerie section.
I was rooted in place, shocked, my hand outstretched as if the kitty were still in front of me. I’d just witnessed my sweet human girl assault a kitten. Had she taken a blow to the head in the destruction? Or a refrigerator? This was clearly a sign of the End Times if young blond women were whacking defenseless animals across a department store.
“Get down,” she shouted, jumping on top of me and knocking me flat to the floor. Just in time, too. Clothing racks shot through the air like red-hot spears right where we’d stood. I rolled, putting myself between Nyalla and the fiery metal raining down around us. Glancing over, I saw a glowing metal piece rolling in a tangle of melted Spanx and push-up bras.
Lingerie. The cat. I had a moment of panic, imagining the adorable kitten impaled by a broken piece of metal. Then my brain caught up with my emotions.
“That cute little fluffy cat?” My eyes met Nyalla’s wide blue ones. She had a smear of red on her temple, and a clump of hair on her forehead matted with dried blood.
“It’s not a cat. At least not anymore,” she breathed.
A yowl echoed across the room, sounding like something a far larger animal would emit than a baby domestic feline.
“It’s coming.” Nyalla squirmed under me. “We’ve got to keep track of it, make sure it doesn’t get out of the mall before Beatrix gets back.”
I noticed how she didn’t add ‘stay alive’ or ‘run away’ from her statement of things we needed to do. So much for a boring task that convinced her to take up a career as a wedding planner.
Sliding to the side that put me between Nyalla and Destructo Kitty, I got up and helped her to her feet. “Who’s Beatrix? I’m assuming someone with Animal Control?”
She laughed but held the golf club with a firm grasp. “No, silly. Beatrix is the gate guardian.”
So that was her name. I was a total shitty friend that I’d never asked.
“I think we’re probably better off waiting for Gregory.” I looked around. “If he ever finds his way back. He took a fridge to the face. From as long as he’s been gone, it might have sent him into another state. Or magically locked him inside. Fuck if I know.”
“Hope he stops by the pet store first.” Nyalla dug around in her pocket and pulled out her cell phone, typing blindly as she scanned for the kitten.
A friendly sounding meow came from our left, and I cringed. “What the fuck kind of cat throws appliances at angels and sets undergarments on fire? Does it shoot lasers from its eyes? Cause houses to levitate?”
“Probably.” Nyalla glanced down at her phone and tapped a button. A red dot appeared on the floor. “Cross your toes and hope for the best.”
“It’s cross your fing—” I only got the first syllable out before a gray ball of fluff streaked across the floor, blasting chunks of concrete and mannequins out of the way. I caught my breath and went to grab Nyalla, who was paying more attention to the red dot of light her phone projected on the floor than Destructo Kitty.
The cat banked left, its claws gouging long marks into the floor as it navigated the turn. Yellow-green eyes were fixed with obsessive attention on the dancing red light.
“It works!” Nyalla squealed.
I was amazed. What a clever girl! Although, we could hardly stand around forever making the cat chase the cellphone app version of a laser pointer, but it might hold us off long enough for Gregory to show up. He knew about drop bears. He probably knew about whatever the fuck this thing was, too.
Although with my luck, Nyalla’s cell phone battery would die. Or... .
The cat turned, ignoring the little red dot and focusing on Nyalla’s phone. I caught my breath. Right before the kitten launched, the thought flitted through my head that this animal was smarter than the average domestic short hair. Much smarter.
I didn’t have time for further thought. The cat sprang. I grabbed Nyalla and teleported.
Thank the fates that Gregory had forced me to hone this skill, although, this time it shouldn’t matter where we ended up as long as we were away from this cat; Tasmania would do just fine. At the last moment, I remembered Nyalla wanting to keep an eye on the cat. I thought about what would happen if this thing got out of the mall—a tiny kitten would find a million places to hide, and who knows how high the death toll would climb before we managed to track it down. So I squeezed my eyes tight and willed myself to stay within the mall. Preferably in a really cool store.
My stupid internal GPS worked. I didn’t teleport us to a cool store, but we found ourselves about a hundred feet away on the opposite side of the cat. Destructo Kitty might be smart, but he’d clearly not had much experience with teleportation. The fur ball skidded to a stop and jerked his head back and forth. Thankfully, he lacked the ability to spin his head around Rosemary’s Baby style, or we would have been screwed.
Nyalla gripped my hand tight, holding her breath. I followed her lead and remained completely still. It was as if we were the only two mannequins in the store that remained upright and in one piece. After another quick scan, the kitten visibly relaxed. Then he sat down and groomed himself.
“What the fuck do we do now?” I muttered. How our roles had changed. I was asking a twenty-one-year-old girl who had spent most of her life as a slave to the elves performing menial labor what to do about Destructo Kitty. W
eird, but I figured she knew more about this little monster than I did.
“We wait for Beatrix. She’s trying to find the nearest pet store.”
Did they sell bear traps at the pet store? I certainly hoped so, because that was the only thing I could think of that might allow us to capture this kitten. And, in all honesty, I was beginning to lean toward blowing the thing up rather than capturing it. I know Gregory frowned on my habit of killing stuff, and for all I knew, this kitten was under some angelic protection. I had enough four-nine-five reports to do without trying to complete an impact analysis on some otherworldly monster cat.
We held still. When you want to remain motionless, that’s when your nose itches, you need to sneeze, and bugs land on your neck. I tried to ignore it all and failed miserably, taking the chance the kitten was too busy licking his balls to notice me scratching my nose. Hopefully he was also too busy to notice Nyalla slide her cell phone from her pocket and check the screen.
“She’s here,” she whispered as she typed a response to the text. “I’m letting her know where we are.”
I saw a brief flash of white, and Beatrix stood near the mall entrance, several bags of what appeared to be oregano in her arms. Destructo Kitty saw her too and abandoned his self-fellatio to shoot a laser beam from his eyes at the gate guardian.
“See?” I was feeling rather smug. “Next he’s gonna levitate a house.”
Beatrix spun out of the way. The laser ripped through the top of one of her bags then tore through a kiosk backdrop and exploded a support pillar.
I wondered if the roof was going to come down on us then recognized a familiar scent amid the smell of burning plywood. “Does she have pot in those bags?”
The cat stomped a little fuzzy paw, sending floor tiles flying up in a wave extending outward from him. The building shook, and we were blinded from the dust and debris raining down on our heads and rising from the bits of flooring flying about. Someone screamed. It wasn’t me; I swear it.
Then everything stopped. Froze. Like someone hit the pause button on the remote. And that someone was an angel.
