Bad Angel

by JC Andrijeski

  Then I get a call from Kara, homicide cop for the LAPD and sort-of friend of mine. She wants me to check out a grisly new murder in Koreatown, one she suspects might have supernatural origins. She thinks my old pal and new dark angel might be involved, and after I visit the scene, I worry she might be right.

  I don’t know it yet, but things are about to get a lot weirder, with arcane witches, angel-worshipping cults, and a lot of things I wasn’t ready to know about myself, or about Phoenix, the one person above all who I’m trying to protect.

  See below for sample pages!

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  Sample Pages

  Fury of Angels (Angels in L.A. #3)

  1 / Back to School

  “COME TO ME, BROTHER. Return to where you belong. We are waiting for you…”

  The voice was soft, caressing his mind.

  Dags knew he wasn’t awake.

  He knew that voice, but couldn’t pull the face out of his subconscious, not well enough to give it a name.

  He hated the familiarity there.

  Truthfully, it scared him.

  “You can’t avoid us forever,” the voice mused. “You can’t hide from what you are. It is odd, brother, that you avoid her, even now. You are hurting her⏤”

  “Shut up,” Dags growled.

  He fought to see who was talking, but all that emerged out of the smoke and fire was a pair of enormous wings, beating inside the red-tinted light. The muscular appendages were huge, beating to raise a cold wind, but the creature wore them with ease, his long blond and brown hair flowing past his shoulders.

  He really did look like an angel, a divine being.

  His wings, unlike Dags’, were pitch black, dotted with scarlet feathers.

  “Do you really think you can take me, brother? Why would you even want that? When I have nothing but love for you?”

  Dags glimpsed that face, the flickering glow of shocking gold and white irises. He saw the perfect jaw, the high cheekbones, the hint of a smile, the flash of teeth…

  None of it ever stayed with him.

  It was a mirage, made of blood-red smoke.

  Dags knew when he woke up, he would remember none of this.

  “Why fight me?” the black- and red-winged angel murmured, speaking directly into Dags’ ear. “Why fight me, when we can be together? When we can be brothers again?”

  Dags felt sick.

  He didn’t know why at first, what it was that bothered him so much.

  Then he realized it was because he wanted that.

  He wanted to fly with his brother again.

  That wanting terrified him.

  HE SNAPPED AWAKE.

  Well, perhaps more accurately, he opened his eyes.

  Gasping, he writhed on his back in the dirt, fighting to pull himself upright.

  He fought to breathe. Dust filled his nose and lungs.

  Strong hands pinned him to the dirt. Panic flooded through him, memories of being shot, being restrained, watching his own blood be drawn and siphoned out of his skin⏤

  He shoved out, throwing his power up through his arms.

  He slammed the person pinning him in the chest, hitting out at them in pure reflex.

  He used the blue-green fire, more of it than he should have. He’d forgotten he was a lot more powerful with that stuff now, after working on it actively over the past few months.

  The weight on him lifted. The instant Dags kicked all of that out, the weight, the hands, the presence⏤it all evaporated.

  The person who’d been holding him down went flying.

  Dags was coming back for real now, though.

  He sat up, panting.

  He realized his mistake a split-second after he’d made it.

  “Shit,” he muttered, dragging himself frantically to his feet.

  He darted after the man he’d thrown, his wings halfway disappeared into his back.

  He’d run maybe a half-dozen yards when he realized he wasn’t going to make it. He’d thrown the guy too fast and too far; he wouldn’t catch him, even using his wings, and he still couldn’t control the damned things anyway.

  He wouldn’t be able to keep the other man from hitting the ground.

  Throwing out both hands as he ran, Dags released a softer bolt of the green-blue fire, trying to slow the other’s fall.

  The blue-green charge enveloped the descending body.

  Dags used the bolt to push him sideways and to slow him down, aiming the muscular, midair body to the right. He pushed the other man towards a thick patch of manicured lawn, rather than the harder wood and stone walkway he’d been about to slam into.

  Luckily, Dags wasn’t just getting stronger with the angel fire.

  He was getting more accurate with it, too.

  The other man landed hard, but bounced on his back in the grass with a grunt, instead of crashing into the stone walkway.

  Seeing the way his body fell, the expression on his face, the position of his limbs and head, and how hard he hit, Dags expelled a huge sigh of relief. He saw exactly where and how the muscular frame landed. He saw the man expertly tuck his head, his torso softening as his arms and hands protected his temples.

  Thank God he was trained to fight; he knew how to take a fall.

  Dags was pretty sure the guy was okay.

  Even as he made that calculation, Dags never stopped running. By the time the other finished bouncing and sliding over the grass, Dags hung over him, staring down into his face.

  “Shit,” he blurted. “Sorry, man. I didn’t know it was you. Are you all right?”

  Ty squinted up at him from the grass, panting, holding up a hand against the brightness of the early afternoon sun. Giving Dags a disbelieving look, he exhaled a half-humorous snort, feeling over his own ribs and chest. From his expression, he wasn’t sure why or how he wasn’t broken in a lot more pieces.

  He pushed himself up to a seated position with a grunt, still breathing hard.

  “Define… all right,” he said, humorously.

  Dags frowned. “Nothing broken. Nothing bleeding internally.”

  Ty pulled in his long legs, bending his knees, and Dags felt his shoulders relax even more.

  “You’re all right,” he pronounced, looking him over. “Does it hurt anywhere?”

  “Not overly.” Ty gave him a sideways look. “Maybe I’d rather be annoyed anyway.”

  Dags held out a hand and arm to help him up. “I warned you about that. I tend to come out of those states in a highly-defensive headspace⏤”

  “‘Highly defensive.’” Ty grunted another laugh, letting Dags pull him to his feet. “Now that’s a euphemism. I think you mean violently paranoid. Violently paranoid and half-stoned on whatever happens to you when you fly.”

  Dags frowned.

  There wasn’t much to say to that.

  “Nothing this time?” Ty pressed, now studying his face. “Really? So just like all the other times, I got tossed for jack-all?”

  Steve McQueen, Dags’ dog, ran up to them, barking indignantly.

  He was obviously nonplussed by the flying.

  And possibly, the blue-green charge.

  When the dog seemed to realize they were both okay, he darted back and forth between Ty and Dags, angling for pets and back-scratches. Dags knew the black-faced, husky-shepherd mix wasn’t overly fond of these training sessions, or flying experiments, or whatever the hell they were. Steve McQueen probably wanted reassurance everyone was still friends and they weren’t actually trying to kill each other.

  As if to emphasize the point, the dog barked at Dags a second time, staring at his face with those
shocking, ice-blue eyes of his.

  Dags knew Steve McQueen liked Ty.

  Steve McQueen liked all of Dags’ new “friends.”

  His dog also made it perfectly clear he felt utterly at home with them⏤in their houses, in their cars, in their yards, chasing their squirrels, on their living room furniture, on their beds, in their swimming pools and kitchens and by their fireplaces. Steve McQueen adopted Dags’ new friends wholesale, even as Dags himself struggled to wrap his head around suddenly having all these new people in his life.

  He’d spent most of the last ten years alone.

  Hell, he’d barely adjusted to having a dog.

  “You want to try again?” Standing up the rest of the way, Ty brushed off his jeans, frowning at the visible grass stains on his pants, his white athletic shoes, and one sleeve of his shirt. “We’ve got this lot to ourselves for a while longer. Bone ain’t coming back for at least an hour. I told him to take his time.”

  Bone was Ty’s personal trainer.

  Ty had, for reasons still relatively mysterious to Dags, taken it upon himself to become Dags’ personal trainer, sometimes with Bone’s help.

  Maybe it was because Dags de-possessed him from a demon that one time.

  Or maybe the tall, rich, ridiculously good-looking Hollywood actor just felt he was best-qualified to take it on⏤not only because he already knew what Dags was, but because he’d starred in a half-dozen action movies, worked with a ton of stunt men, trained in martial arts and weights and parkour and whatever else.

  Whatever his exact reasons, Ty assigned himself the task of whipping Dags into shape.

  Unfortunately, Dags wasn’t fully convinced his particular “skill set” was one you could hone, like a bodybuilder in a gym, or a boxer in the ring. It was pretty hard to work on something when you couldn’t remember anything you’d done while you were working on it.

  Dags tended to black out when a lot of his angelic powers manifested.

  In particular, he blacked out when his wings appeared.

  Dags also couldn’t control when or where that happened.

  Ty had Dags working out in the usual, non-angelic ways, too. The actor had this theory that if Dags developed more discipline in general, it would bleed over into the angelic stuff.

  It was something to try, anyway.

  At that point, Dags would try pretty much anything.

  For the same reason, he didn’t argue when Ty pulled Dags into his daily workouts with Bone. Bone had something like four black belts in various martial arts. He’d been a professional boxer. He choreographed fights. The forty-something man was so ripped he looked more like a comic book drawing than a real human being to Dags.

  Bone had them doing everything from hot yoga to kung fu to boxing to rock-climbing, running and lifting weights, balance work on beams and wires, flipping tractor tires, running obstacle courses, learning parkour, swimming, doing Tai Chi, meditating.

  When Bone wasn’t there, Ty worked with Dags on the more angel-y stuff.

  Ty broached the possibility of telling Bone about that, and including Bone in that aspect of his training too, but Dags said emphatically no.

  He really couldn’t afford to have even more people know about him.

  Weirdly, sometimes Karver joined them.

  Once or twice, Asia joined them, too, and Kara Mossman, the LAPD homicide detective Dags had known since high school.

  Dags had only one rule.

  He demanded Phoenix be left out of it.

  He knew Phoenix knew about that rule. He also knew it royally pissed Phoenix off, in part because Ty told him so, point blank. Karver and Asia also felt the need to inform him that Phoenix was furious with him, and to detail all the reasons why his “rule” made no sense to her, and why she thought he was an asshole for excluding her.

  Dags refused to budge.

  No way was he doing anything that might push Phoenix even faster towards her own angelic nature, not when he couldn’t control those abilities himself. He’d more or less accepted he probably couldn’t keep her from awakening that side of herself totally, but Dags saw zero reason to help it along.

  No way was he going to deliberately tip her into the same freefall he’d been in since his own supernatural crap got activated.

  He’d done enough to her in that regard already.

  Besides, Phoenix was pissed off at Dags for a lot of reasons right now.

  One more wasn’t going to make much of a difference.

  “Come on,” Ty said, thumping him on the back. “Let’s try again.”

  Dags frowned, looking out over the ocean.

  “Where did I go?” he said. “Did I go somewhere and come back?”

  Ty stopped where he’d been about to walk away, back to the stone bench they’d been using as a kind of launch pad. The bench stood next to a fountain in the middle of the lawn, where a bronze Neptune held a trident, surrounded by dolphins and jumping fish spitting plumes of water.

  Resting his hands on his hips, Ty met Dags’ gaze.

  “You flew off somewhere,” he said, motioning vaguely at the water. “It was over the ocean, so I think you’re safe, in terms of being spotted. If anyone saw you, they probably assumed it was some kind of homemade glider meant to look like wings.”

  “I’m not worried about being spotted,” Dags muttered. “I’m worried about hurting you.”

  Ty rolled his eyes. “You’ve never come close to hurting me, Dags, not while you’re in that state. Frankly, you’re more dangerous when you’re waking back up again.”

  “It would only take once.”

  “You’re just paranoid because you don’t remember it.”

  “Yes,” Dags said, giving him a disbelieving look. “Exactly.”

  Ty shrugged, waving it off like it was nothing.

  Somehow, that only made Dags’ jaw clench more.

  But Ty was back to thinking about the other thing.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t be so blasé about you being seen,” the actor said. “We should get you a mask or something to wear, at least until you’ve got the basics of this flying shit down. There aren’t a lot of houses up here, and airspace is restricted, but more and more people have drones. Reporters have them cruising around up here all the time, looking for shots of celebrities they can sell.”

  Still thinking, Ty held up a hand.

  “Hold here for a minute. I might have something in the house.”

  Dags only clenched his jaw, biting back his frustration.

  He stood there, hands in his pockets, looking out over the ocean as he waited for the other man to return. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, which felt weird for some reason, maybe in part because of the detailed feather tattoos that covered his arms and shoulders.

  Still, being shirtless on the lawn of his self-appointed trainer’s multimillion-dollar Malibu home was better than running through a half-dozen T-shirts while they tried to figure out why Dags fell unconscious every single time he flew.

  They’d tried doing this at night, initially.

  It didn’t really work. For some reason, at night, Dags had a tendency to disappear and not come back.

  He woke up naked in a few state parks.

  Once, he woke up on the roof of an apartment building in Hollywood.

  Another time, he got woken up by a security guard on the green of Dodger Stadium, not long after the sun came up. He’d been lucky not to be arrested that time. He’d been even luckier that his wings had already retracted.

  Usually, he woke up somewhere on his own property, though.

  He woke up in his own bed. Once, he woke himself up dive-bombing into the pool attached to his rental property… which was awkward, since he had new tenants as of two weeks ago, and while they hadn’t said anything, Dags strongly suspected they already thought he was eccentric-veering-into-insane.

  He’d only met them formally a few times. They were more studio people, and seemed nice enough, but they could hardly be expected to be chill about a dera
nged lunatic with wings dive-bombing their swimming pool in the middle of the night.

  Even if he was their landlord.

  “Here,” a booming voice said, making Dags turn.

  Ty was walking towards him across the grass.

  The action movie star and sports nut tossed him something while he was still a good five yards away.

  Dags caught it in reflex, turning it over in his hands.

  It wasn’t a ski mask, like he’d been expecting.

  It wasn’t even cloth. It was made of dark and light wood, and looked African, or possibly Native American. The carved face appeared to be a hybrid between a wolf, possibly a dragon, possibly a mythical bird. It had a canine’s triangle-shaped face, curved horns instead of ears, what looked like feathers carved into the edges, or possibly scales, or both.

  Blank holes cut in the wood served as eyes.

  Still holding it in his hands, Dags gave the other man a disbelieving look. “You want me to scare the hell out of people?” he said.

  Ty suppressed a smile.

  “No one will mess with you,” he said, quirking an eyebrow.

  Dags exhaled. “I’ll probably break it when I land. Or break my face.”

  “Nah. You seem to have good instincts when it comes to not killing yourself. I’ve watched you land… a lot of times. Light as a feather. This last time, you came down on the balls of your feet with barely a bounce. It was like watching a bird land on a thin branch.”

  Dags blinked.

  It was strange to think someone else had seen him do that.

  Ty knew more about his flying than he did.

  As if picking up on some of what Dags was thinking, Ty grunted, folding his arms.

  “See?” he said. “You might be unconscious, but you’re not stupid in that state. Or violent. Or confused. You know who to avoid and who it’s okay to be yourself with. You landed in front of me because you knew you could. So the information’s traveling one way. It’s just not going the other way for some reason.”