“Uri,” he managed, as she jerked open the passenger door.
She shoved him inside, into the shotgun seat.
“Uri,” he said.
Without looking up at his face, she grabbed the metal end of the seatbelt, dragging the nylon belt over his lap and chest, leaning over to click it into place.
“They took him,” she said.
Before he could speak, she leaned back, out of his lap, and slammed the Jeep door.
Dags sank back into her Jeep’s passenger seat, gasping for breath, trying to breathe, watching as she ran around the Jeep’s front grill. He watched her climb into the driver’s side. She yanked on the parking brake, right as there were sudden, loud PLOINKS and PINGS, two of them leaving holes in the safety glass not far from where Dags sat.
He stared at the holes.
He knew what they meant.
He felt powerless to move, but desperately wanted to warn Phoenix.
“They’re shooting at us,” he managed, turning his head towards her.
She gave him a flat look, yanking down on the gearshift, taking her foot off the clutch. She mashed her other foot down on the gas pedal, keeping her head down as she gripped the steering wheel in both hands.
The Jeep leapt forward, and Dags gripped the dashboard.
He was pretty sure he was going to be sick.
His thoughts focused solely on her now, be careful, be careful, be careful.
He wanted to pull her head down, get her out of the line of fire, but his hand fell on her thigh instead, and he left it there.
She didn’t try to push it away.
He must have blacked out.
He didn’t really remember the part before the blacking out part, either.
He barely remembered the drive.
He definitely didn’t remember getting out of the Jeep.
He wasn’t in the Jeep now.
Dags opened his eyes, and found himself staring up at a ceiling, a high, white ceiling that felt strangely familiar. It didn’t look right. It didn’t look like something in a hospital, or an emergency room clinic.
Then again, Dags didn’t have a lot of experience with hospitals.
Most operating rooms he’d seen were from shows he’d watched with his parents as a kid.
This definitely didn’t feel like one of those hospitals.
A bright light shone on him.
He was missing his shirt.
At least two people stood over him.
He could feel more in the room, but he could only see those two. One of them, the closer one, was poking at him with what looked like really long tweezers. She angled them, two-fingered, using round, metal fingerholes. That same person gripped a hand-held machine in their other hand, something that looked like a really expensive GPS tracker.
“I think it passed through,” she was saying, turning her head to talk to someone else, another person Dags couldn’t see. “I’m not picking up on any metal inside him. It’s as I said before… he’s got a good-sized exit hole up front. As far as I can determine, the bullet passed through. Are you sure he was only shot the one time?”
“Pretty sure,” a familiar voice said.
“Pretty sure?” another voice grumbled.
The first voice, the achingly familiar voice, didn’t answer.
The second voice, which was also familiar, spoke up again, sounding doubtful that time, worried.
“Is he going to be okay?”
Asia. That was Asia talking.
Dags closed his eyes against a wave of nausea.
What was Asia doing in the operating room?
Why would the doctors allow that? Was she even wearing a mask?
Then again, this was a damned strange operating room. If he didn’t know better, he would have sworn he was lying on someone’s kitchen table.
“I think so,” the doctor-person said, sounding as doubtful as Asia. “The wound looks strange because he’s healing strangely⏤”
An expressive grunt.
It was the first voice, the disturbingly familiar one, the one that brought a roiling, near-pain sensation to his gut.
The doctor-person looked in the direction of the grunt.
“Do you see that?” she said, pointing at Dags’ chest. “It’s already closing up. I thought I would have to seal off the artery there, but it appears to have just… sealed itself.”
Again, that expressive grunt.
“Will he be okay?” Asia said again, still sounding worried. “He really looks pale. Like he lost too much blood. Did he lose too much blood? Does he need more?”
“Maybe he needs to stop getting shot,” a male voice muttered. “I mean, Jesus… what the hell’s wrong with this guy?”
There was another silence.
Dags was now completely confused.
He wanted to turn his head, to ask one of them, but he couldn’t move.
“He’s awake,” someone said. “Is he supposed to be awake right now?”
“No,” the doctor-sounding person said, clearly disturbed. “No, he’s not. I gave him enough morphine to down a small rhinoceros.”
Dags watched that same woman set aside the long tweezers. Seconds later, she was holding up a syringe, tapping the liquid inside with a finger.
He wanted to protest, to tell her no, that he didn’t want it.
He remembered the vial⏤
But something was already entering his skin.
He felt pressure on his arm, intense enough to make him gasp and blink. Liquid entered his bloodstream, something thicker-feeling than blood, something that made his teeth grind, his head swim.
Again, he didn’t remember passing out.
Chapter 21
Bad Angel
“No.” Dags swam into the dream space, scowling at the old man as soon as he saw him. “No. Go away. I don’t want to hear it. I can’t deal with you right now⏤”
The old man smiled. This is how you greet your elder?
“I mean no disrespect⏤”
His grandfather is already waving off his words.
What are you afraid of? His voice is softer than usual, a whisper on the wind. What are you afraid of, Kills Many? Are you afraid for her? Or for yourself?
Dags doesn’t want to hear it.
He doesn’t want to think about it.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter which thing comes first, which comes second. He can’t do it. He can’t.
The Change had been damned hard.
Harder than he usually admitted to himself.
Almost harder than he could survive.
He remembered nights where he wanted to die, it hurt so much. He remembered feeling like he was dead, that someone or something had killed him.
He wouldn’t wish it on anyone. He wouldn’t wish it on⏤
God, Phoenix. He couldn’t do that to her. He couldn’t.
Before the Change, Dags had a place in the world. He had his people, friends who were more like family. He had his actual family, and while hardly perfect, they loved him. He had a plan for his future. He had hobbies, dreams. He was going to go to college. He was going to be an artist, someone who made a real mark in the world. He went from having all of that to⏤
Nothing.
He lost everything.
Everything he was. Everything and everyone he cared about.
For years, he was completely alone.
He was still alone⏤
You’ve never been alone, the old man whispers.
⏤He still had no one.
What happened to Dags was done. It was done.
He couldn’t reverse it. No one could take it back. He couldn’t hide in her world, and he didn’t want to drag her into his batshit crazy, either. He couldn’t fucking do it to her. He couldn’t do to her life what he’d done to his own. He can’t.
He won’t.
He hates that he feels they are asking it of him. He hates that they want him to destroy the one person he’s trusted with any of t
his.
You know why.
But Dags doesn’t want to hear it.
He doesn’t want to hear any of it.
He’s made up his mind. There’s nothing more to think about.
There’s nothing more to be said.
Far away, barely audible, an old man chuckles in the wind.
He woke up to his jaw painfully clenched.
His eyes opened out of sheer stubbornness, out of defiance, out of a refusal to…
To what, exactly?
He touched his face, and was startled to find tears there.
Rubbing them away, Dags shook his head, his jaw clenching harder.
It was bright. He fought to focus on that, on the sun, the fact that it was morning. A strange feeling of déjà vu hit as his eyes took in the white ceiling. He recognized the ripple of watery sunlight, a little lower on the wall than where he remembered it.
Then he remembered something else.
He tensed, looking down at his chest.
It was bare still, but no longer covered in his own blood. He raised a hand tentatively, touching the bandage there, wincing when it hurt.
He could breathe.
He could breathe again.
He was alone.
Being alone was both a disappointment and a relief.
He needed to get the hell out of here.
He needed to get away from Phoenix. He needed to go somewhere where he could fix the damned hole in his chest, close the wound for real, and go after Uri. He might need to do some of it before he left here, if only to convince Phoenix and the rest of them he could leave on his own, that he was well enough to walk out of here on his own two legs.
He frowned up at that familiar white ceiling, fighting to control his emotions.
Why was he so damned emotional right now?
He needed to get out of here.
Now.
Deciding he didn’t care who saw him, he ignited the blue-green angel fire, opening up and hovering a hand over the bandage on his chest. He focused there, sensing the gaping wound. He channeled as much of the fire into that wound as he could. He’d only really done this once before, but he had to hope it would work a second time.
Maybe it wouldn’t fix it totally, but⏤
“What are you doing?”
Dags jumped violently, turning his head towards the door.
Inexplicably, he didn’t stop channeling the light.
It felt good, so that may have been part of it.
He had no idea if the blue-green fire was fixing the problem with his chest, but the wound definitely felt better once he doused it with that flickering, coiling, alive-seeming current. It felt so much better, he didn’t want to stop. He could feel the hole in his chest a lot more clearly now; he could almost see it, in his mind’s eye.
Maybe for the same reason, he couldn’t bear to stop, and not only because it hurt like hell.
With the light on it, it hurt more; it also felt inexplicably good.
When he didn’t answer her, she put down the tray she was holding, setting it on a table by the wall. Without waiting, she kicked off the sandals she wore and crawled into bed with him.
He wanted to protest, but he didn’t do that, either.
She brought herself right up to his chest, leaning against his unhurt side while he continued to flood blue-green angel fire into the wound.
“Will that fix it?” she said, her voice wondering.
“I don’t know.”
“Have you healed yourself before?”
She looked up from the light, meeting his gaze.
He found himself staring at her face, at her eyes, unable to not stare at her.
The realization was infuriating on some level, maddening, in part because there didn’t seem to be a damned thing he could do about it.
He needed to get out of here.
He needed to go back to leaving her alone, to being outside her life.
“You look beautiful right now,” she murmured. Sliding closer, she leaned more of her weight on his side, seemingly unbothered by the light and current flickering and sparking over his bare skin. “You look like… I don’t know. Unearthly, like…”
She seemed to be thinking.
Then her full lips quirked in humor.
“…like an angel,” she finished. “You really do look like an angel.”
“I’m not a very good angel,” he observed, still trying to focus on the wound and not her. “Aren’t they supposed to be good?”
“Maybe you’re a bad angel,” she suggested.
He met her gaze, quirking an eyebrow in spite of himself.
“Like your password?” he said.
She smiled, lifting a shoulder in a shrug. “Maybe.”
She traced her fingers over his ribs, watching the light interact with her hands and skin. Dags watched it, too. He watched that blue-green light coil around her fingers and hand, interacting with that more subtle glow around her, the glow that wasn’t really an aura, but was something else.
“Wouldn’t that make me a demon?” Dags said, after that too-long pause.
Thinking about that, Phoenix shook her head.
Something about her answer was touchingly, achingly guileless.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.” Raising her green and gold eyes, she met his gaze. “Maybe you’re the good guy who does bad things for the side of good.”
He quirked an eyebrow at her.
“You know,” she said, ignoring his obvious skepticism. “Like a war angel. Like the angel who comes along to right wrongs. Maybe you’re the angel they send after the demons. While the other angels are all busy playing harps or whatever.”
Dags let out an involuntary snort.
“That’s… a theory,” he remarked.
She was curled around him again, on his right side, his uninjured side. She folded her arms on his bare skin, swimming in the blue-green current, bathing in it, while still avoiding his bandage and where he concentrated the healing light. Resting her chin on her folded hands, she shrugged, studying his eyes.
“Maybe angels are nothing like the myths,” she said. “Maybe they’re more complicated.”
He looked down at her, wanting to be annoyed.
He wanted to be annoyed with her, to be frustrated with her being there, oblivious to everything that was wrong with him, everything that scared most people off, or drew them to him for all the wrong reasons. He wanted to be irritated with her for planting herself inside his light like she had every right to be there.
He wanted to, but all he could feel was relief.
“It’s only been one day,” she informed him. “If you’re freaking out, thinking another week has gone by, it hasn’t. It’s only been one day. You got shot yesterday afternoon.”
Dags opened his eyes.
He hadn’t even noticed he’d closed them.
His hand still hovered over the hole in his chest, channeling light into the wound. He could feel he wasn’t done yet, but already, his shoulder and arm felt better, looser.
Staring up at the ceiling, he fought to think through what she’d just said.
He opened his mouth, about to ask⏤
“They got Uri.” Her voice sounded sad that time. “They shot you, then took him. They just walked around you.” Her voice grew angrier. “They left you there, bleeding on the street. It was like you were just in the way.”
There was a silence.
Then Dags shook his head.
“No,” he said, clearing his throat. “Well… not exactly,” he amended. “Maybe that’s what it looked like, but at least one of them sounded mad I was shot. I think some of the demons went rogue. Maybe the one in Kara, and the one they call Molokai.”
He turned his head, looking at her as he remembered something else.
“You hit her. With your car.”
“Kara?” She frowned. “I was trying to kill her.”
“There’s still a human there,” Dags said, frowning. “It
’s not actually Kara, you know. Not right now. A demon is possessing her.”
Phoenix winced. “Yeah. I wasn’t really thinking that clearly.”
“You didn’t kill her, did you? They might have crazy healing abilities as demons, but I’m pretty sure if you kill her… she’s dead.”
Phoenix shook her head, exhaling as she lowered her chin back to her hands. “No. I didn’t kill her. She was coming after us when we left. I think she’s one of the demons who left a bullet hole in my Jeep,” she added sourly.
Dags felt a tightness in his chest relax.
“Okay. Good.”
“Why didn’t they come after us?” Phoenix said, frowning. “If Kara and that other guy wanted to kill you so bad, why not follow us? They must know where I live. If Kara knows, then they know, right? Don’t they get access to all the person’s knowledge, too?”
Dags nodded slowly, still thinking.
“I think so,” he said. “It’s seemed like that before.” He glanced at her. “Maybe the others stopped Molokai and Kara. Their boss wanted us alive. Maybe he still does.”
“That’s the ‘Father’ person?” Phoenix lowered her chin back to her hands. “Do you know who that is? Have you seen him?”
Dags shook his head. “No.”
Pausing, still thinking aloud, he added,
“I’m glad they didn’t know you were there. I don’t know what they would have done, if they’d known that. Maybe they would have taken both of us.”
She frowned.
“You wanted to go alone,” she reminded him. “Maybe now you’ll stop arguing with me every time I try to help you.”
Dags didn’t answer.
“I can almost see that brain of yours working, you know,” she grunted, still sounding annoyed. “I’ve been around you enough now, it’s almost physically visible to me. I can also tell when you’re blowing me off.”
He glanced up, still using his left hand to focus the light into his chest.
He thought about answering her.
A second later, he decided against it.
When he remained silent, she startled him, smacking him on the arm that wasn’t manipulating the light. Wincing, he threw up that same arm and hand, shielding his chest instinctively.
Bad Angel Page 17