by Holley Trent
Lady catches on fast.
Noelle might not have been able to look without loosening her barely-suppressed coil of anger, but she felt the suffocating heaviness of angel energy pushing at her back. Reflexively, she forced her shoulders back and down, and filled her lungs.
“Lola,” December said, “this is Noelle and Jenny.”
The goddess bowed her head slightly. She could have passed for thirty with her long black hair and smooth brown skin, but Noelle guessed she was at least a hundred times that. She knew better than to ask.
“A pleasure to meet you,” Lola said.
“You ’ave a lovely ’ome,” Jenny said.
Noelle nudged her with her elbow.
Jenny cringed. “Sorry. Was watching My Fair Lady on the plane. Along with my mother, Eliza’s got me in a state, but I’ll do better.”
Lola quirked a brow.
“All righty, then.” December rocked back on her heels. “So, should we just … I mean, this is my first time negotiating one of these things.” She passed a hand through her curly hair and grimaced. “This is something else.”
“Let’s get down to brass tacks,” Noelle said through clenched teeth. She didn’t turn around, and held a flicker of hope that she wouldn’t have to. If she could endure the entire exchange without having to look at Tamatsu’s smug face, there was a small chance no one would lose any blood. She’d sold houses without ever meeting the sellers, and hoped the situation at hand wouldn’t be much different. “The long and short of the situation is that he has information I want. When he proves the information isn’t bogus, I’ll give him what he wants.”
“One small problem,” came a deep, thunderous voice behind her.
She needed a moment to not only identify the speaker, but also to tamp down her kneejerk assumption that he was calling her the small problem. Short jokes were one of her pet peeves.
She pulled in another deep breath and rubbed her throbbing neck. “Hello, Tarik.”
“Noelle. You look well.”
“Apologies for not turning to confirm the same about you. I would have hoped that by now, you would have improved the sort of company you keep.”
Tarik breathed out one of those angelic sighs that always sounded like the origin of a tsunami. “How fare you, Noelle?”
“As fine as could be expected, and you? How’s it been hanging for the past eight hundred years or so?”
“It hangs superbly.”
“Gods, you were always the literal sort.”
Drumming her fingertips against the sides of her arms, Noelle pointed her gaze over the deck railing to what appeared to be a birdbath in the back yard. She’d never had problems with her vision, but she wasn’t quite ready to believe what she was seeing was a cougar balanced on its hind feet. Its mouth was wide open as its front paws gripped the edge of the water bowl. The allusion was macabre, even for her.
“As I was saying,” Tarik said, “the problem is that we can’t take you to who you’re seeking until morning. The hour is late here, and even later where your friend is.”
“Since when did angels start keeping respectable hours?” Noelle asked.
“I didn’t say we did. Others do.”
“You may have had a point there. Cinnia had always been a respectable sort.” She probably even went to bed before midnight. “How do I know you’re not jerking me around?”
“Are you insinuating that either of us has that kind of time on our hands?”
That question made Noelle turn.
Tarik—big, dark, and beautiful as always—was in the corner with his arms crossed over his broad chest. The top of his head nearly skimmed the pergola rafter. He’d upgraded—or downgraded, depending on whose opinion was in play—his wardrobe. The last time she’d seen him, he’d been swaddled in a football field’s length of fabric in the style of whichever Ethiopian tribe had seen fit to adopt him. His modern garb included a ragged black trench coat, faded tan cargo pants, a plain gray shirt, and shit-kicker boots. In the past, he’d worn that beastly angel-honed sword out in the open and nobody batted an eyelid. He probably couldn’t do that anymore. She’d stopped carrying a sword sometime during the nineteenth century. Shotguns had been better at keeping bandits from getting close.
To Tarik, she said, “Give me a plan.”
“We’ll go in the morning. Five our time.”
Noelle glanced at her watch and hitched her purse’s strap up onto her shoulder. “Well, then. We’ll be back here at four forty-five.”
“You may as well rest here,” Lola said. “If I had known the circumstances sooner, I would have suggested you take rooms here rather than at the motel. I hear the accommodations there leave something to be desired.”
“Oh, they’re not that bad, ma’am,” Jenny said. “I’ve stayed in much, much worse. Why, during the eighteenth century, pretty much anyplace you stayed in some parts of London made you worry about catching something.” Jenny shuddered. “I’m ever so happy for the advent of indoor plumbing.”
“You’ve always been easy to please,” Noelle muttered.
“I’m just a dressmaker. I can’t really expect much, can I? I’ve always had to depend on someone else’s grace.”
“Give yourself more credit, dear.” Noelle turned to Lola. “I appreciate the offer, but our things are at the motel, and—”
“I’ll fetch them,” Tarik said. “What room are you in?”
“That’s not nec—”
“Room E,” Jenny said. “Shouldn’t be too much to gather up unless Noe unpacked her entire makeup kit.”
Noelle closed her eyes and sighed again, but even with her lids down, she caught the flash of angelic teleportation. The light he put off warmed her skin like sunshine.
“I’ll show you to your rooms,” Lola said. “Step carefully, please. My granddaughter is occasionally a light sleeper. She doesn’t like to think she’s missing anything.”
Lola stepped up into the sunroom, and then passed into the kitchen with Jenny right after her. December followed, and then stopped, likely noting Noelle hadn’t followed. She waved Noelle on.
For some reason, Noelle seemed to be frozen in place. She could wriggle her toes in her shoes, and she could certainly grind her teeth quite viciously. She just couldn’t impel her feet to budge—not without doing one thing first.
That rat bastard.
“I hate you,” she said to Tamatsu. “Let go of me.”
He didn’t say anything of course, because he couldn’t, but she saw his slight movement in her periphery. Perhaps he was drumming his fingers or shifting his weight. She couldn’t tell, and she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of looking his way. He was apparently demanding she do such.
“What’s wrong?” December asked.
“The angel fink has my muscles locked. I guess he doesn’t need to speak a curse to be able to do that.”
“I didn’t know they could do that at all.”
“Oh, they can do all sorts of things. Some very good, some very …” She hissed. “Very bad.”
December wagged a finger at him in a way that was comically maternal. “Tamatsu. Stop that.”
More slight movement in his corner. He’d probably shrugged.
“Let go of her so she can sleep. You may not need to, but she does.” December furrowed her brow. “I think. Do elves need to sleep?”
“Yes,” Noelle said. “In fact, more than you do in certain seasons. Come winter, I’ll be useless for a good fourteen hours of the day.”
“Is that true of all elves?”
“Most elves. Depends on how much magic they had before we lost the bulk.”
“I want to hear that story.”
“It’s quite long.” And it wasn’t hers to tell, really. If anyone were to tell the story, Cinnia should have. She was the one who’d emptied their land to undo one man.
Noelle laid her head to the side and rolled her shoulders back. He was still psychically tugging at her, demanding she look because he wa
s a vain angel and so many angels had fallen for being the exact same way.
She wasn’t going to look, though. She was stronger than that.
He let go of her, and she didn’t hesitate. She damn near hurled herself over the threshold and nudged December onward.
Keep going, keep going.
A few more steps, and she would be too far to see.
As she put her foot up to the kitchen step, her body betrayed her. Her head turned and torso along with it. Her gaze went automatically to the looming figure through the sunroom glass who stood with his hands in his duster’s pockets, peering at her through eyes as black as the heavens.
His hair was loose, a shiny, dark mass that hung over his shoulders and down his back. Feet of hair for her to twine her fists around, for her to bury her face into when she slept like the nearly dead during the winter.
He’d never moved back then. She’d wake up, and he’d be exactly where he had been with her fingers tangled up in that silken length and him rubbing her back or some other foolish thing.
She narrowed her eyes at him.
He knew what he was doing.
He knew he was beautiful. They all were, but he’d been hers, or at least she’d thought he’d been.
December tugged her by the arm into the kitchen. “Come on. Don’t get enthralled. You’re standing there agog like some of the Maria locals do whenever we make field trips to Tiny’s taco truck.”
Noelle straightened her spine and said in a huff, “I wasn’t agog.”
“Close enough.”
“Then I assure you …” Noelle couldn’t help but to glance over her shoulder, if only to confirm there was no one there. She needed peace of mind. Fortunately, he wasn’t behind her. “It was entirely his fault. But then again, so much of this mess is.”
CHAPTER SIX
The last time Tamatsu had watched Noelle sleep had been during a snowy winter in Dewa Province. They’d been traveling together for weeks. Initially, she’d kept up with him, trouper that she was, but as the weather turned colder, she’d become more sluggish.
He’d finally made her rest, and that was his first big mistake. If they hadn’t stopped, he might never have touched her.
He put his feet up on the bed and crossed them at the ankles.
Back then, she’d slept on her belly and often with her head hidden beneath a pillow. She still did.
He’d always thought that was charming, though the soft obstacle made looking at her as she rested somewhat more difficult. He wasn’t one of the rare angels who could see through things.
He peeled back the wrapper on the protein bar he’d found in his coat pocket before he’d taken the thing off. The bars were bland, but they were filling … at least for a while. He’d need a good meal before teleporting anywhere or he wouldn’t have the energy to move efficiently. He could usually manage to get himself where he needed whether or not he’d eaten, but if he had to carry others, he’d have to push his power outward. He avoided doing so as much as he could. The exertion made his hungers flare, and no one but Tarik—and perhaps Gulielmus—understood. It was hard to speculate anymore on what Gulielmus knew and what he didn’t. He’d lost most of his memories.
Tamatsu chewed in silence for a while. He watched her strong but delicate limbs twitch beneath the covers and listened to her amusing mutters. There had been nights that he sat quietly, listening to her talk in her sleep all night. She’d tell stories—entire histories of some elf or another, complete with magical dueling and sword fights.
He didn’t know if the tales were fiction or truth, but they seemed plausible enough while she was telling them, and she always woke before finishing them.
There in Lola’s house, she didn’t seem to be telling a story, though. She was talking about Las Vegas burlesque shows, missed coffee, and real estate. An odd combination for sure, but she’d always been unpredictable. That was probably why he’d been so drawn to her early on. He’d craved new experiences, and she’d given him plenty.
He raised the phone he’d pilfered from Tarik’s pocket to his eyes. He barely knew how to work the damnable thing, but the humans around couldn’t seem to separate themselves from theirs. They even slept with them. Tamatsu could divine some necessary uses for the devices, but all the rest—he didn’t understand. The plinking electronic games. The apps that told people how many steps they’d walked. The email and social media apps so people were connected all the time via airwaves and electrons, but never in person.
Texting might have been useful in some situations, but for the most part, Tamatsu didn’t see the allure of being so connected. All that typing would just remind him that he couldn’t communicate in the way that typical people did. It’d remind him of everything he’d lost.
He could, however, see the benefits of having a world of information at his fingertips. After checking forecasts for the states along the Mississippi and ensuring there was no extra rain forecast for the upcoming week, he opened a search engine and grunted as he tapped his thumbs against the tiny screen. He was frustrated that the device only read his touches half the time. Angel energy apparently wasn’t compatible with touch screen technology. Normally, he would have done his due diligence much sooner, but he’d convinced himself he was too busy. He’d found Noelle after centuries of searching thanks to the power of the Internet, but he hadn’t actually dug into what she’d been up to. Once he’d found her real estate ads, he’d stopped digging, perhaps afraid of what he might find.
He needed to know.
He tapped in her name in quotation marks the way December had shown him and watched the search results pop up.
More real estate listings. Lots of real estate listings. She kept busy. She was respected, from the looks of things.
He snorted.
Respectable was another word that should have gone into quotation marks. “I’m not decent, my love,” she’d said more than once with a grin, and he’d never believed her until …
Well. Until she’d proven that she’d told the truth all along.
At the bottom of the second page of search results, the data became less business and moderately more personal. Her LinkedIn page was there, which listed all the companies she’d worked for in the past ten years, but no history before that. She had a Facebook page with very little content—mostly pictures of houses and “Did you know?” factoids about the state of the housing finance industry. Scrolling further down the list of search results, he found articles.
There were newspaper stories about Noelle and Jenny, or Noelle on her own doing community service work, mostly related to housing. He found several of those going from Vegas, to Seattle, to Sacramento, and one from New Orleans. She fell off the internet beyond the decade, probably having changed her name. Name-changing and moving were a near-immortal’s periodic chores, much the same as going to the dentist or replacing one’s roof. Angels didn’t generally bother. They never fully integrated into society, but people like Noelle, who lived and worked amongst humans, had no choice.
December had also taught him how to search for similar images, so he started a new query using one of Noelle’s headshots.
He found one image that was a best guess by the search engine, but posted under the name “Elle Marks.”
The woman was Noelle. An inattentive human might have disregarded the hit, but Tamatsu would have recognized her anywhere—even with the falsely red hair and the big round sunglasses that obscured half her face.
He did a search for Elle Marks in New Orleans and immediately wished he hadn’t. Elle had been a social creature. Almost every article had an image of her with some businessman or other, and they were all smiling, their hands out of range of the camera’s lens. On her ass, probably. She didn’t seem to care.
There were message board posts and public Facebook messages asking things like, “Whatever happened to Elle?”
Tamatsu ground his teeth and set down the phone.
“Elle” was asleep in front of him. She’d likely
touched and been touched by so many lovers in the centuries since he’d last seen her, and that was her right. She could do what she wanted. She wasn’t his and couldn’t be. No one could be, because he couldn’t touch people the way they wanted to be. Still, knowing that she’d been able to move on from him so easily would wound any man’s pride.
The door creaked open. Tarik appeared in the gap with brow furrowed.
Grunting softly, Tamatsu held out the phone to him.
Take this damnable thing.
“What are you doing?” Tarik whispered.
Tamatsu rolled his eyes. It was obvious that he was torturing himself. Angels were better at self-flagellation than any other creature on the planet.
“Use wisdom,” Tarik whispered. “Don’t do this.”
Tamatsu set down his feet and stood. The floorboards creaked as he moved across the room, but she didn’t stir.
Tarik closed the door and folded his arms over his chest, staring at him.
Tamatsu shook his head.
“Fine,” Tarik said. “I mean only to spare you pain. I don’t wish to see you suffer, and certainly not at the hands of someone who obviously has little regard for you.”
Tamatsu headed to the stairs.
His friend often misjudged him. He thought Tamatsu was far nobler than he actually was, but if Tamatsu were so damned righteous, he wouldn’t have Fallen in the first place. He’d been so hungry to experience the things humans did, and he’d made his choice. He suffered for his choices every day when he starved. He couldn’t stop feeding himself unless he wanted the pain to come back. He’d endured so much pain after Noelle had left him. He’d stopped feeding one hunger “cold turkey” as the humans might have said, and a year of crippling pain to certain male parts of his anatomy followed.
A carnal touch could ignite the hunger again. He couldn’t let that happen. “Better safe than sorry” had been his mantra. He let few people near enough to touch him.
Tarik clasped Tamatsu’s shoulder and gave it a firm squeeze. “Have a meal. Take a walk and clear your head before we go. I’m certain that whatever’s unsettling you will unfurl in time.”
