Airs & Graces (6 page)

“I never noticed the phone or the desk before, but that’s how you guys do it, isn’t it? You hide things in plain sight. Like the frat house or the abbey – they’re things we see, but they mean something different to you, right?” She walked over to the desk and grabbed the handle on the lone drawer. “This must have been here since I started working here, but until Piorre was dying, I didn’t even see it or pay it any mind. So I think it’s here.” With a bit of fanfare, she pulled the drawer open to reveal an empty space.

She furrowed her brow as I pushed past her. “Excellent,” I commented under my breath.

“Or, it could be invisible?” she said. “Why can’t I see it? He always looked nervous when I caught him back here.”

I reached down and touched the cloth, pulling it off of the book. Separate, they looked like a tiny handkerchief and a book; together they gave the appearance of an empty drawer. Together with an ancient spell of concealment, that is. Piorre was a player in the game, not just a bystander. That made me pause and rethink what Adelaide’s role would be, if Piorre had planned to accomplish this goal at all costs. Did that mean she was an acceptable loss, or something more?

There was movement by the back door and front door simultaneously. “Cops?” Adelaide asked.

I pointed to the faint golden glow of her necklace and said, “Not entirely. Possessed, likely. We should try not to hurt them.”

“Okay, why don’t we go? Do your thing. Get us out of here.”

“We just got here. I need time to recover.” I looked toward the front, and Adelaide grabbed a candlestick from a nearby table.

“Gotcha, so nothing permanent.”

I looked at the candlestick. “They still have guns.”

“Well, I wasn’t prepared for this,” she snapped.

“We need a way out.” I could see the light of flashlights approaching from both sides.

“The loft,” she whispered and moved toward the stairs. I followed as quickly as I could, but they were both on me just after Adelaide made it to the third stair. They’d embraced their Demonic physicality instead of bothering with the vessels’ guns. A stroke of luck if there ever was one.

I could feel the claws on my back as I tried to follow Adelaide, and the roar of the Demons startled her. “Fucking son of a bitch!” She turned to see me pull my blade and slash through one of them, only the light passing through the vessel, cleansing it of the Demon inside. A rather normal-looking police officer slumped to the ground, unconscious but physically unharmed.

The other lunged for Adelaide, but I swept his legs out from beneath him before he could reach her. As he clawed me and spat at me, I held him down with my left hand, slowly lowering the lighted portion before the physical blade into his chest until the Demon was burned away, leaving only the man. To my surprise, Adelaide was wielding the candlestick, ready to slam it down on the head of the Demon if need be.

“Is he him again?” She looked rattled but determined.

“Yes, the Demon is gone.” Not without leaving claw marks in my back and shoulder, but I wasn’t about to let those slow me down. “We need to go. Others are coming.”

“How bad?” she asked as she smashed a glass case with the candlestick. She removed a vintage dress from the display and shoved it inside her jacket.

“Go now!” I ordered. She turned and led us up the stairs to the loft – and to a window that had a fire escape only a few feet away from the balcony of the adjacent building. It appeared she was intending to climb down, but that would have put us in the search area of the incoming Demons, so I grabbed her by the waist and leapt across.

“You want to fucking tell me before you do that? I think I left my stomach on the other fire escape.” I put my hand over her mouth, and to my surprise, she didn’t struggle.

We watched them crawl all over the building across from us, but then they seemed to lose patience and howl into the twilit sky. The sun was crawling away over the horizon, leaving us all in darkness. The eyes of the Demons and possessed vessels glimmered with the infernal energy – to those with the Grace to see – as they stared out into the dark, looking for us. Then they disappeared into the building and eventually into the street. By the time one of them thought to look on our rooftop, we had already slipped away.

“Are you hurt?” Adelaide asked.

“Yes.” The claw marks were plain on my flesh. I suspected whoever had put the Demons into the hosts may have given them some extra enchantment for that fight. They’d cut deeper than they should have.

“Is it bad?” She made a move as if to examine the wound, but withdrew. Perhaps it was the brisk pace, or the fact that we were still being hunted, or maybe she didn’t understand how Angels bled. Whatever her reason, she didn’t try again.

“I’ve had worse.” I’d hoped that a little levity might improve her spirits, maybe improve the mood, but she looked somber at my comment. She may have looked a bit sad. “We got what we came for.”

“So, when do we find out if the book we took is the right one?”

“It’s the right one,” I assured her. “It was the only one with celestial power… that we could see.” Of course they were all protected from my sight. So I stopped, and cracked open the book in the doorway of a closed business.

Adelaide immediately began ripping off a small section of my shirt, which had been significantly damaged already, wrapping it around my shoulder as best she could, using it as a makeshift bandage.

The contents of the book read as I would have expected them to, which is to say like nothing out of the ordinary. Piorre was journaling his path to understanding the Grace without using any language that would let on exactly what he was doing. He’d memorized or hidden the formula someplace else; this was simply a progress report.

Adelaide peered curiously across the top of the book, down at the words. “Is it the book? For unfolding and keys and all that?” She looked at me, and a car passed by on the street. We’d need to tend to the wounds more thoroughly, she’d need food, and we needed to read – without drawing too much attention.

One hasty washing-off of blood and one cab ride later, we were sitting in a greasy-spoon diner near the center of the city. People stared. Perhaps it was the bandages under my leather coat, or the mussed appearance I displayed, but it seemed that I was drawing attention. After a moment, I realized it was the fact that I had not changed clothes since I’d been to Earth, and Adelaide, freshly scrubbed in a fancy vintage Asian-style dress over her jeans, made for quite the contrast.

Rather than correct the problem, I ignored it. They were looking at us for a reason outside of the reason I’d hoped to avoid them looking at us, so I let it go.

Adelaide, shifting in her seat, began to speak quietly. “I think I figured some of this out on my own, so can I just tell you what I think is going on and have you correct me if I am wrong? It might be easier than a whole bunch of little questions.”

I nodded.

“Okay then,” she continued. “I got to work, and my boss was on the floor dying. I couldn’t find a phone, and I didn’t want to leave him, and I saw one under a desk. I grabbed it, and an awful sound came out of it, and a projector came on, but it wasn’t a projector was it? It was whatever Piorre put into me coming online. The Angel’s Grace, you said. Whatever that is.”

I nodded again.

“Then that Rahab guy showed up, and he was some sort of Demon.”

“Not a Demon, but one of the Fallen, yes,” I corrected softly. The distinctions might not come easy to her, but I had agreed to set her straight.

“Okay, not a Demon, but a Fallen Angel.” She took a breath. “Then we went to a frat house that wasn’t a frat house but some kind of HQ for the Archangels, where we met Uriel, Gabriel and Michael, and I had my first solid vision thing from this Grace stuff.”

I once more nodded. That had been my indication that the bonding had happened, after all.

“I saw something, but I don’t know how this Grace stuff works, I’m pretty sure it just shows me shit that’s already happened, and I’m not gonna lie, Tab: what I saw was pretty awful. If you don’t want to talk about it that’s fine, but can you at least confirm or deny if it was something that really happened?”

“I’d need to know what you saw.” I had my fears.

Another deep breath from Adelaide, and those fears were quietly confirmed. Changes in lighting and stone walls had led to a stone table, blood, and me. Her eyes occasionally went to my now-cropped shirt, perhaps wondering if there were scars on my chest underneath.

“Yes,” I said. “That happened.”

Her face fell further. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Okay.” I was grateful that Adelaide let it go. She took a breath, and continued. “So I came to outside of London, and you looked fit to be tied, then you said something about pulling the Grace from my being, which I am guessing is what is giving me these looks into the past. You wanted it out of me and thought it would get sorted separately.”

I nodded. “I had initially thought that.” I didn’t want to focus on my misjudgment of Iaoel and did not precisely need to, as she’d asked me only to correct her when she said something inaccurate.

“At this point all these questions come up, but we’ll get to that later. Thank you for being patient with me. Where was I?”

“The Abbey,” I said, preparing myself for the barrage of questions about Hadad. His names, nature, and history were complex enough for even a more focused and informed person.

“Right, so you said something about this Grace stuff being in me and some mess it once caused, and before I know it, we’re marching up the road to see an old enemy of yours. So when you were talking to the scary dude with the bad tan, that was about when I figured out that this Grace thing had me seeing things, I just wasn’t sure if those things happened in the past or not and was going to ask you later, but that question is answered so moving on…”

At this sudden efficiency, even in the face of her apparent need to remember everything aloud in the hopes of clarity, I couldn’t help but chuckle.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“You don’t want to know what Hadad is?”

“He’s a right scary motherfucker,” she replied. “That’s what he is.”

“Fair enough. You wanted to move on?”

If her intent expression did not quash any desire for laughter, her responding question. “Yeah, okay. So who is Iaoel and where did you hide her?”

I hoped that shutting my eyes would be betray less of a reaction than showing them. “She was the Angel of Visions,” I said, more glad than ever that we were being quiet. “When her physical expression was destroyed, I hid her Grace in Piorre, years ago.”

“Holy crap, that’s what’s in my head? Some Angel’s soul?”

“The closest equivalent possible. Now, I believe you were reviewing our visit to the Abbey.”

“Right. So aside from even more traumatizing stuff I didn’t need, and something about some keys, I mostly got a pretty, if scary, but still useful necklace out of that encounter, and then all of a sudden we’re outside a ramshackle village in apparently Chile with two trucks full of Demons coming at us. By then I was about to have a full-on melt down and told you so, and then you brought me to Seattle, and we grabbed my boss’ journal…and here we are. So what
exactly
is going on, Tab? No bullshit, I’m scared, and I’m trying, but forewarned is forearmed, and I feel like I am
way
behind on the learning curve.” She sat back in her seat and sagged a bit, her dark blue eyes tight with worry, her attention full on me.

“What’s precisely been going on,” I finally said, still quietly, “has changed from preventing your murder by Rahab – or by Michael when it turned out the Grace could not be extracted easily – to preventing Judgment Day. Information about the keys and about the Judgment changes everything. We must get to the keys first, which means unfolding the Grace, something Piorre was trying to do. You’ll need to follow the same path.”

“Only without the getting killed part at the end,” she clarified, her expression somber and far from glib.

“Ideally,” I affirmed.

“So, how do I do this?” She took the diary in her hands.

I leaned forward and started to explain. “The diary itself is nothing but footprints in the sand. We can track his progress to or away from an important landmark. We can determine what his motivation was. Failing at that, we could probably try to achieve the same results by performing the same action. For example, if he was looking up people and apologizing to them, he’s trying to clear the slate and take a burden off of his conscience.”

“I see,” she said. “If he’s looking for ways to give back to the community, he’s repenting for past indiscretions. Like that?”

“Yes.”

“So all I need to do is read the diary.” She took the journal from my hand and opened it up to the front, a lock of her hair dangled down between her eyes and mine as she read. I watched her quietly until her eyes came off of the book and met my own.

“Why are you staring at me?”

I looked left and right at the people in seats all around us. “Am I bothering you?”

“Not exactly, but you’re staring. Just, I don’t know, look someplace else.”

I was confused. “I thought you liked to be looked at. It’s why you put so much effort into looking a certain way.” As I said the last, the waitress arrived and smiled at me.

“Trust me,” the young woman said. “Every girl likes to be noticed. It’s just a matter of what form that attention takes,” she offered.

“Oh great,” I heard Adelaide mumble under her breath, as if hoping I didn’t hear.