Angel Burn

by L. A. Weatherly

  Alex’s expression went very still as he looked down at me, his dark hair stirred by the slight breeze. I picked up a sudden wave of his emotions, and they almost brought tears to my eyes. Gently, he took my face in his hands and kissed me.

  “I love you, too,” he said against my lips.

  JONAH GLANCED AROUND HIM nervously as he entered the café in Denver’s Lower Downtown district. He didn’t go into Denver much, spending most of his time at the cathedral, and had never been to LoDo, with its Victorian houses and art galleries, at all. It had taken him several wrong turns to even find the café, much less somewhere to park. More than once he had been tempted, strongly, to just forget the whole thing and go back to his apartment at the cathedral.

  But somehow he hadn’t.

  Now, as he ordered a cappuccino at the counter, he heard someone say his name. “Jonah Fisk?”

  He turned and saw a tall man with broad shoulders and blond hair standing there. He had the same intense eyes as Raziel. Jonah licked his lips. “Yes, that’s me.”

  The angel held out his hand. “Nate Anderson. Thanks for coming.”

  Jonah nodded, still unsure whether he should have done so. When he’d gotten his coffee, he followed the angel to a table at the rear of the café, half hidden by a large ficus tree. A woman of about thirty with shoulder-length brown hair was already sitting there, wearing a tailored suit. She half rose as Jonah approached.

  “Hi. Sophie Kinney,” she said, offering her hand. Her brown eyes weren’t angel intense, but they were still pretty intense. Jonah shook her hand, then sat down hesitantly, suddenly feeling as awkward as he’d felt back at college.

  “Well, first of all, thanks for the tip-off,” said the angel. There was a half-drunk coffee in front of him; he took a sip. “I thought Sophie and I had gotten out in time; I didn’t realize that they were on to me.”

  “That’s OK,” said Jonah, his voice faint. It hadn’t really been his intention to tip the angel off that the others were aware of his traitorous activities; he had just needed to talk to him. But of course in doing so, the effect had been the same. Already, just by doubting the angels, he may have caused irreparable harm to them. His stomach clenched at the thought.

  Gazing down, he stirred his cappuccino. “Look, I’m not sure I should be here. I mean, I just wonder if all of this is a mistake. The angels helped me; they really did.”

  “You’ve seen one?” asked Nate. “In its divine form, I mean?”

  “Yes, it changed my life.” Jonah described the encounter.

  As he finished, Nate sat back in his seat, a look of surprised pleasure crossing his handsome face. “One of the marshalers,” he said to Sophie. “How about that for luck, with the Second Wave about to come — that Jonah ended up as Raziel’s right-hand man?”

  “Um . . . what?” said Jonah.

  Sophie leaned toward him. “Listen, it’s not a mistake, I’m afraid,” she said crisply. “Angels are here because their own world is dying; they’re feeding off humans. They cause death, disease, mental illness. We’ve been trying to fight them covertly, but now that the department’s been taken over —” She sighed.

  “What about the angel I saw, though?” said Jonah. “She was . . . ” He trailed off. The angel who had come to him was one of his most cherished memories; he didn’t want anything to change that.

  “She was on our side,” said Nate. “Not all of us believe that angels have the right to destroy humanity; a few of us are trying to stop it. She didn’t feed from you; she was doing something called marshaling — placing a small amount of psychic resistance in your aura to make you unpalatable to other angels. It can sometimes be passed from human to human, too, in the right conditions, through auric contact — it’s our hope that if we do enough of this, it might start to make a difference.”

  Unpalatable to other angels. Jonah froze in his seat. His words stumbling over themselves, he said, “I — I’ve seen other angels in their divine form since then, at the cathedral, but — they never touch me for more than a second. I just sort of get glimpses of them, and then they’re gone.” Dizzily, he remembered the woman in the corridor, the long moments she’d spent smiling upward. The angel touching her had clearly been taking its time doing it.

  Nate nodded. “It worked, then — good. It doesn’t always.”

  “Which means you don’t have angel burn,” added Sophie.

  “Angel burn?” Jonah raised his coffee cup, holding it in front of him almost like a shield. As Sophie explained, he felt himself go pale. “You’re saying that it’s true, then; the angels really are feeding off people. Literally feeding off them, hurting them. And that — that the people just see them as good and kind.”

  “That’s about right,” said Sophie. “Apart from the physical damage, it pretty much fries the human brain. You get sort of obsessed with them — everything is praise be to angels.”

  Jonah winced at the familiar phrase.

  Nate rested his muscular forearms on the table. Though the angel had an easy grace to him, he was built like a football player. “Look, the thing is, it’s about to get a lot worse,” he said. “And you’re in a unique position to help us, if you’ll do it.”

  The bustling café noise seemed to dim around him. Jonah’s heartbeat quickened with apprehension. “What do you want me to do?”

  The pair told him. By the time they had finished, Jonah’s coffee had long grown cold and the funky LoDo café with its worn tables and posters of movies on the walls had taken on the feel of a nightmare. “I — I don’t know if I can do that,” he stammered. “I mean, it’s true that I’m in charge of the celebration, but . . . ”

  “It all depends on finding the half angel,” said Sophie. “She’s the only one who might be able to succeed.” She let out a short breath. “We were close, but we lost them; now they could be anywhere.”

  “But even if we find her, we’d need your help to actually pull it off,” said Nate. “We couldn’t do it without you, in fact.”

  Jonah stared down at his cup and saucer. His previous unshakable faith in the angels felt like a pain inside of him — something beautiful and precious that had been sullied forever. He didn’t want to believe this; he wished that he could just get up and walk away and pretend that none of it had ever happened. But even if he did believe it, how could he possibly do what they were asking?

  I can’t, he thought. I just can’t do it.

  They were both watching him, waiting for him to speak. Finally Jonah cleared his throat. “I’ll have to think about it,” he said.

  Sophie’s mouth pursed with frustration; she started to say something, and Nate put a hand on her arm. “Do that,” he said. “Jonah, I think you know that we’re telling you the truth. The situation is grave, and it will just get worse. Humanity as you know it isn’t likely to survive this.”

  “You, more than anyone, know the sheer scale of this thing,” said Sophie tightly. “So, yes, think about it — but don’t take too long; we’re running out of time.” She took out a business card and a pen, scratched out the phone number on the card, and wrote a new one. “Here,” she said, handing it to him. “Call me the second you decide.”

  Jonah nodded, gazing down at the card. SOPHIE KINNEY, CIA. He’d throw it away when he got back to his apartment, he thought. Even if every word they had said was true, there was simply no way he could do this.

  “Thanks for coming,” said Nate. His chair scraped against the floorboards as he stood up. “We’ll leave you in peace now. And, Jonah . . . ”

  Jonah looked up, and the angel smiled at him — a sad, understanding smile, his eyes burning into Jonah’s. “Sophie’s right,” he said. “Don’t take too long.”

  The days turned into a week, then slid past two, so that it started to feel as if Alex and I had all the time in the world. Except that sometimes, under the lazy rhythm of our days together, I flinched with sudden terror — a cold foreboding, as if something was on the horizon waiting for us. I couldn’
t tell whether it was something I was actually sensing or just my own fears. I didn’t mention it; there was no point unless I got something more definite. Alex and I both knew that we were in danger and that our days up at the cabin couldn’t last forever. For one thing, the weather was turning. The air bit at us with the threat of winter now; often I had to wear two sweaters when we went outside. Before long, we’d have to decide our next move and face whatever was coming next, but I didn’t want to bring it out into the open, not yet. It was as if we could put off the inevitable by not talking about it.

  Even with these worries, Alex and I kept growing closer, until it seemed like we were two sides of the same coin.

  “He was just . . . incredible, actually,” he told me one night after we’d finished eating dinner. We were sitting talking, with the camp lantern casting a gentle glow on the table between us. “I mean, no one else even knew about angels, much less how to kill them. Dad learned it all on his own, testing different ways to destroy them — Christ, he should have gotten himself killed a hundred times over, but he didn’t somehow.”

  I was listening with my chin propped on my hand. “Where were you and Jake while he was doing this?”

  “At home, at first. In Chicago. He hired someone to look after us.”

  After their mother had just died? It sounded awful for such young children. “OK, go on,” I said after a pause.

  “Then about six months later, when he had his funding and was ready to start training other people, we moved to the camp with him. He was still traveling a lot then, though — he had to recruit new AKs, follow leads, that kind of thing. It was a few years before the camp really got off the ground.” Alex smiled wryly, playing with a camping fork. “And then another few years after that before he started to lose it.”

  “Lose it?” I stared at him in surprise. “I didn’t know that.”

  Alex tapped the fork lightly against the table. “Yeah. For — I don’t know — five years, maybe, Dad was the best of the best. I mean, nobody was a better AK than him. And it wasn’t just hunting; it was strategy, too, and training and organizing the hunts. But then he just . . . got obsessed.”

  “Obsessed how?” I asked.

  Shadow bathed Alex’s face as he gazed down, accenting his lips and cheekbones. He shrugged. “Killing angels was all he could think about. After a while he wouldn’t let any of the AKs take time off, ever. Everyone at the camp was going stir-crazy, ready to kill each other. That’s when people started sneaking time after a hunt, just a day or two to take a break.”

  I shifted on my chair, watching him. “Like you and Jake, when you fixed up this place?”

  He nodded as he glanced at the walls around him. “Yeah, that was good,” he said quietly. “That was a really good time. People used to sneak down to Mexico a lot, too. Or up to Albuquerque. Anywhere where they could just have some fun.” He made a face. “Fun had gotten to be a concept that Dad didn’t really get anymore.”

  I watched the fork as he tapped it against the table, not sure whether I should ask. “How did your father die?” I asked at last.

  The fork kept the same rhythm as before. “An angel ripped his life force away. He died of a massive heart attack.”

  “You were there,” I said, feeling it suddenly. I reached for his hand. “Oh, Alex, I’m sorry.”

  He nodded, his jaw tensing. “Yeah, it was . . . bad. But I don’t know; he died fighting, I guess. He would have wanted that.”

  “You must be really proud of him,” I said softly. “And he must have been proud of you, too.”

  Alex gave a short laugh. “He used to say I was too damn cocky for my own good. . . . Yeah, he was, though. He was proud of me.” He glanced up at me and smiled, squeezing my fingers. “OK, enough about me for now,” he said, leaning back. “Your turn. What’s something I don’t know about you?”

  All at once I really wanted to tell him about my mother. I pulled one of my knees up to my chest. “Well — you don’t know how Mom and I first came to live with Aunt Jo.”

  Alex shook his head. “No, how did you?”

  “We lived in Syracuse,” I said, tracing my hand across the worn wood of the table. “And Mom was on welfare. Everyone knew that she had mental problems — I mean, she’d been diagnosed, and all that — but no one knew how bad it was, except for me. She was able to — to put on a facade for a long time, when other people were around.”

  I told him how Mom had gradually gotten worse and worse, so that by the time I was six or so, I had to cook for us both and do all the cleaning and laundry. “I always made sure that I kept the house really nice,” I said. “So in case anyone came in, they wouldn’t know anything was wrong. I got myself off to school every day and every- thing.” I fell silent, remembering sitting in the back of the school bus gazing back at our dinky little house, so worried about leaving Mom there on her own all day.

  “What finally happened?” asked Alex in a low voice.

  “I got home from school one day when I was nine, and Mom wasn’t there.” I looked at him, tried to smile. “I waited for hours; I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want anyone to know, but I was really scared. So finally I called the police, and they came over. It turned out that they’d picked her up that afternoon. She’d been walking around in a daze, wandering in traffic. She didn’t know who she was.”

  Alex reached over and took my hand, gripping it wordlessly.

  I let out a breath. “So, they put her in the hospital, and they put me in a foster home, and it was horrible. I was there for almost a month.”

  “What about your aunt?” said Alex. His fingers were warm against mine.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t know where she lived. They must have found her before too long, but it took a while for everyone to figure out what they were going to do, I guess.”

  His voice hardened. “So . . . what? You’re saying that she just let you sit in a foster home for a month?”

  Slowly, I nodded, remembering the tiny bedroom that I’d shared with a girl named Tina — how she always wanted me to talk to her, and I wouldn’t talk to anybody. I used to lie on my bed for hours staring at the wall, hating everyone there.

  “Yeah,” I said finally. “I mean, I don’t know what was going on in her life or anything, and I guess it was a pretty big disruption to suddenly have this nine-year-old foisted on her.” Alex didn’t say anything, and I went on. “Anyway, after a while she came and got me, and I went back to Pawtucket with her. And then a few weeks later, Mom came to live there, too. The doctors thought she should be hospitalized full-time, but insurance wouldn’t cover it all. That sort of thing is really expensive.” I looked down. “You know, I always hated my father, anyway, for doing that to her. But now that I know he was an actual predator, that he never cared about her, it just makes it ten times worse somehow.” Not to mention that I come from him; I’m a part of him. I didn’t say the words.

  “I know,” said Alex. And I could tell from his voice that he did. He understood exactly how I felt about all of it, even the parts I’d left unsaid. He rubbed my palm. “You’re not your father, though. You’re nothing like him. You were there for her; you cared about her more than anything.”

  I swallowed hard, confronted by so many memories. “She’s my mom. I love her. I just . . . wish I hadn’t let her down back then.”

  “Willow.” With his other hand, Alex touched my cheek. “You know that’s not true, right? You did better than some adults would have done, and you were only nine years old. You did everything you could.”

  Letting out a breath, I closed my hand over his, leaning my head against it. “Thanks.” I managed a smile. “I’ve never told anyone that before. Thanks for listening.”

  He smiled slightly, too, and stroked back a strand of my hair. “I’ve never told anyone about my dad before, either.” For a minute neither of us spoke, and then I got up and slid onto his lap, wrapping my arms around him.

  We sat holding each other for a long time
, with the lantern light burning golden beside us.

  “Oh! That is so cold!” I shrieked, half-laughing as Alex poured a canful of icy water over my head, and then another. He started laughing, too. “You’re the one who wanted to wash it. Hold still.”

  Finally — just when I was about to tell him to forget it, that I didn’t care anymore whether I still had shampoo in my hair or not — he said, “OK, I think that’s all of it.” I felt him wrap the T-shirt around my hair, squeezing the water out.

  “Oh, thank God!” I straightened up from the stream, drops of icy water darting down my neck. “I’m never washing it again; I don’t care how disgusting it gets.”

  Alex rubbed my arms briskly, grinning. “You say that every single time.”

  “It’s true this time. I swear that water’s twenty degrees colder than it used to be.”

  Back in the cabin, I sat on the bed to comb out my hair, trying not to get the sleeping bags wet. It was such a relief to have clean hair again, even if it felt all tangled. Alex sat next to me, leaning back against the wall.

  “Your nose is all red,” he observed.

  “Yes, that’s how it gets when I’m dying of hypothermia.”

  Bending forward, Alex kissed the tip of my nose. Then he got up and went over to his bag; crouching down beside it on the floor, he unzipped an inner pocket. He came back and sat beside me again. “Here.” He handed me a small white box. “Happy birthday.”

  I took the box, feeling stunned. I had lost all track of time up here. “Is it my birthday? But — how did you know?”

  Alex gave a sheepish grin. “I sort of looked at your driver’s license when you were taking a shower that first night in the motel.”

  I held the box in both hands. “You didn’t! That’s not even fair — you don’t even have a driver’s license with your real details on it.” I looked down at the box, touched its slightly dimpled top. “What is it?”

  “Open it and see.”

  I eased the lid off, and then just sat gazing downward. There was a necklace inside — a slim, shimmering silver chain with a crystal teardrop hanging from it. “It’s beautiful,” I breathed, drawing it out. The faceted pendant winked in the sunlight, turning on its chain. “Alex, this is so . . . ” I trailed off, at a loss for words.