by Chloe Garner
“Fast,” she agreed.
***
The hotel was nice, but not extravagant, by her previous life’s standards.
It was inconceivable, by her current situation.
They’d fallen into each other, a sort of recklessness to it that told her that he’d not only missed her as much as she’d missed him - he’d been just as afraid he’d lost her.
They lay in bed, quiet, for a long time after, he running the barest tips of his fingers up and down along her arm, spilling cascades of quiet shivers that she was sorry when they ended. He wrapped his fingers around her hands and kissed her palms.
“You’ve lost weight,” he said.
“Not eating will do that,” she agreed. So will getting sick on what you do eat, she thought, but kept that part to herself. He shook his head.
“Why didn’t you call?”
“Furling fried my phone after I lost my car,” she said.
“You lost…”
He buried his face into her hands, laughing.
“You’ve got an apartment?”
“I’m working with kids like Robbie who can see furlings. Trying to keep them out of treatment. As much as I can.”
He tipped his head, and she nodded. He grinned.
“Perfect,” he said. She drew a long breath and nodded, rolling onto her back and letting him lay alongside her with his hand on her stomach. It made her want to cry.
“Tell Robbie I miss him,” she said.
“Tell him yourself,” Trevor retorted, and she shot bolt upright.
“He isn’t here.”
Trevor laughed.
“He isn’t here. But you should call him.”
“I’ll have to copy your contacts out of your phone,” Lizzie said. “I don’t have any of the numbers for back home. I actually looked up the tattoo parlor and left a message there.”
Trevor laughed.
“That probably would have eventually worked.”
He turned her hand and ran his thumb over the inside of her wrist.
“Regrets?” he asked.
“No.”
Did she wish an awful lot of things were different? Oh, yes. Did she regret any of the decisions she’d made that got her here?
No.
She sighed.
“I’m so glad to see you,” she said.
“Tell me about your demon,” he said, shifting to lay with his shoulder under her head and an arm around her. They looked up at the ceiling, side by side, a long expanse of skin pressed to skin making her not want to think about the terrible things out in the world just now, but she needed to be responsible with the time she had.
She had so many questions.
“He calls himself Beelzebub,” she said. “The hooligans call him Zee, and he seems to go along with it.” She turned her head to look at him. Ran her finger along the stubble on the bottom of his chin, and he wrapped her hand in his, holding it against his chest. “He’s evil. They told me that he threw a kid off a building for standing up to him.”
Trevor shifted.
“He hasn’t hurt you, has he?”
“Nothing serious, by going after my physically. The battles are brutal, though.”
“Tell me about those,” Trevor said.
“He shakes the ground so hard I fall down sometimes,” she said. “I can’t fight with him at all. And the hooligans… sometimes they’re just trying to stay out of the way. I’ve pulled them out of piles of furlings a couple of times now. He’d let them die.”
Trevor nodded.
“He have any tricks other than the shaking-the-ground thing?” he asked. She looked up at him.
“Why?”
He shifted an inch lower so he could look her in the eye.
“I’m not leaving,” he said.
“What?”
He nodded, then smiled impulsively, his mouth splitting to a grin after another moment, then he smothered it in an effort to be serious.
“They don’t have an angel, but if they don’t have an angel or a demon, they can kind of just push the furlings around, and the number of furlings around should generally go down little by little, and…” he shrugged. “They just exist like that. If another demon shows up, they’re going to need an angel bad, but…”
“You’re abandoning Robbie,” Lizzie said, almost sitting up. He wrapped his arm tighter around her, and she didn’t fight him.
“He agreed to it,” Trevor said. “They all did. They liked you, and they…” He tipped his head back and forth for a moment. “They get that they’re going to be okay.”
Lizzie shook her head.
“You’re going back. They need you.”
He laughed.
“You do see that they’re better off without me. They need an angel a hell of a lot more than they need a demon. If you only get to pick one…”
He shrugged.
“And I’m allowed,” he said. “I’m allowed to be impulsive and do what I want. I’m the demon. You don’t get to fight with me on that.”
She closed her eyes.
“That wasn’t what I wanted.”
He laughed.
“And if you’d ever gotten a vote, maybe you’d be justified feeling bad about it. But you didn’t, and now I’m here and your demon is trying to kill you. So… Yeah. No regrets here.”
She turned her face against him, pressing her mouth to his skin.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she whispered.
He played with a lock of her hair.
“Yeah.”
She sighed.
“So what happens now?”
“You can’t have two demons,” Trevor said. “Not both trying to be the demon. And not for long, anyway.”
“So what happens?” Lizzie asked.
“I kill him or he kills me,” Trevor said. She looked at him.
“He’ll kill you,” she said. “He’s stronger than you are.”
Trevor tipped his head back and laughed.
“Robbie said you’d say that.”
“What?” Lizzie asked. “He’s strong.”
“You think what he’s doing is hard?” Trevor asked, shaking his head and pulling her back down against him.
“He could kill me any time he wanted to,” Lizzie said. “I’m getting stronger, but…”
“Don’t worry about me,” Trevor said.
“I don’t want you to do this,” Lizzie said.
“You think I’m doing it because of you?” Trevor asked. She looked at him and he nodded. “Of course I am. But that doesn’t make it not the right thing to do, anyway.”
She laughed.
“Far be it for you to do the right thing for its own sake,” she said and he laughed.
“Exactly.”
She was smiling.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d smiled like that. He reached down and pulled her chin up to kiss her.
“We’re together,” he said. “We agreed on that. Even if one of us gets killed any day in the future, we’re together for now.”
She nodded.
This wasn’t how she’d expected that to turn out, but he was right.
She spent the rest of the dawn telling him about the hooligans, about Zee, about her clients, and at one point he laughed.
“What?” she asked.
“You aren’t going to like it,” Trevor said, “but Paul is going to be your new lieutenant.”
“What?” she demanded and he nodded his chin against her head.
“Yup.”
“I have one,” she said. Slug wasn’t really that interested in working with her, but she could tell that that was what he was supposed to be doing, just as clearly as he could.
“Slug is dead, darling,” he said.
“I thought Rat was dead, but she came back,” Lizzie said. He shook his head.
“Guy like Slug, whatever his real name was, he can’t just run away. He and Blister have it the worst, right now. Had.”
She shivered and he
tightened his arms around her.
“No, Paul’s your guy. Going to be a hell of a lieutenant.”
“I don’t want him involved,” Lizzie said. “Neither does Magda.”
He laughed.
“So?”
“I want him to go to college and have a real life,” she said.
“Who says those things can’t happen?” Trevor asked. “Sure, Lara pulling it off was something else, but the hooligans don’t have the same commitments that an angel does. He would have to show up, every time, but we could make that work.”
“They’re all broken,” Lizzie said. “I don’t want that for him.”
“The ones you saw were,” Trevor said. “But you’re shortsighted like that.”
She looked at him, and he laughed, biting the tip of his tongue.
“You never even noticed the ones who shows up for battles and left. You were too preoccupied with what you were doing, and what Robbie and Sybil were doing.”
She widened her eyes at him and he nodded.
“True story.”
She relaxed against him again.
“None of the hooligans here can even feed themselves,” she said. He nodded, rolling fingers over her ribs.
“That’s because of your demon, not the furlings,” he said. “He’s just a fountain of furlings, on purpose, I’d guess, and he calls battles every day because he likes them.”
“And he likes the control,” Lizzie said. Trevor laughed.
“Whatever explains it for you,” he said. Her phone rang, and she scrambled to the side of the bed to dig her purse out of the pile of blankets there and answer it.
“Now,” Zee said.
“Where?” Lizzie asked.
He gave her a location and she nodded to herself.
“Okay. We’ll be there in an hour.”
“Not good enough.”
She hung up.
Trevor was watching her, and she sighed.
“Well?” he asked. She told him where they were supposed to go and he nodded.
“I’ll drop you off at your apartment on my way,” he said. “I assume you know how to get there, after that.”
She nodded.
“Would it be better if the hooligans not get involved?” she asked. He shook his head.
“You’re their angel, not their mom. They can go or they can run away, whichever they like, but you don’t get to choose for them.”
She sighed again. She hadn’t understood. Still didn’t. Why did they even show up?
“Okay,” she said, and he leaned out across the bed to put his fingers behind her ear and pull her forward, kissing her once, deep.
“Get dressed,” he said. “We’ve got a war to run.”
***
The walk was slightly longer than an hour, so they ended up being an hour and a half to get to the bridge where Zee was waiting for them. He was already pacing.
Furlings crawled in and out of the rocks at the foundation of the bridge, but there was no bright, shining stream of order up above. A fender-bender had snarled traffic, and a streetlight appeared to have fallen over the side of the bridge and was hanging by a wire maybe a dozen feet overhead.
The hooligans stayed behind Lizzie as she approached.
Zee knelt, putting his hands on stones to either side, and the ground trembled under Lizzie’s feet, as she’d grown accustomed to it doing, but the number of furlings wasn’t big enough to really create the swarm reaction she’d seen so many times, now.
He roared at the sky and flung rocks at the hooligans, who scattered. Lizzie watched as one of the great stones landed at her feet, and looked at him with cool eyes.
“Don’t just stand there,” he yelled, and she shrugged, closing her eyes and feeling out the direction she was supposed to go, then drifting toward her spot, watching as the hooligans fled. Zee was still throwing rocks at them. Rat stopped and picked up a rock, throwing it at the bridge, then running some more. Lizzie twisted her mouth sideways at the pathetic attempt at creating chaos - it was nothing compared to what was already going on, up on the bridge, but at least it was something.
Lizzie ended up on the other side of the bridge in a stand of tall weeds. The light here was dim, but not as dim as it had been yesterday. She could feel Zee not far from her, thrashing and fighting, shaking everything in a sort of impotent rage, and she carefully felt out the ground around her, looking for points that would give her a grip, where she could reach them with her own energy.
The ground was hard and smooth to her, like looking for a place to plant a flag in the middle of an asphalt parking lot.
She was isolated, as separate from what was going on as she had been at the very beginning. Only this time, she knew what she should have been able to do, and she might have been yet more frustrated.
The furlings seemed confused and disorganized. It would have been a perfect opportunity for the hooligans to practice working them, but they sensed the amplitude of the conflict that was going on and they were all completely hidden. It didn’t help that Zee was still throwing rocks, himself, and had begun roaming.
Lizzie held her ground as he got close, throwing stones at her that fell to either side. She opened her own eyes to watch, wondering why she was so unconcerned about the violence he was trying to threaten her with.
She turned her head to watch a particularly large stone as it soared past her at shoulder height, then closed her eyes, feeling a deep dark coming out of a stand of trees behind her. Zee was too angry to have noticed it. She turned all the way around to see Trevor pick his way down the stones.
“That’s enough of that,” he said, stopping next to Lizzie.
“Who the hell are you?” Zee asked.
“I’d give you an ultimatum to just walk away, but I don’t intend to let you,” Trevor said.
“You do this?” Lizzie asked, looking around. He nodded, and she grinned. “It’s good work.”
“Thank you,” he said without looking away from Zee. There was an intensity to him that almost frightened her. She thought that she had never seen him like that before, but somewhere deep in her mind she knew that she’d always seen him like that before - that that was what he was like underneath the puckish ephemerality that he coasted around on the rest of the time.
Zee curled his fingers up away from the ground, summoning a quake that Lizzie could actually hear in the trees behind her. Trevor laughed.
Laughed.
There was no mirth there at all.
“You think that’s impressive?” he asked. “I’m from California. You should see what I can do when I put my mind to it.”
Lizzie shuddered at the tone of his voice, as he dropped down another step, not looking at her.
“You don’t know who you’re messing with,” Zee said. Trevor shrugged.
“Don’t know, don’t care.”
“You don’t want this zone anyway,” Zee said. “The pack is pathetic.”
“Is that how you’ve managed to hold onto it?” Trevor asked. “Make sure that you keep the pack so held down that they aren’t worth taking? That’s sad.”
Zee took a step up the embankment toward him with a clear intent to hit him, and something tweaked in Lizzie’s stomach, the idea of that brute getting close enough to Trevor to hurt him, but Trevor twisted his head to the side, like a morning stretch that a lion might use, and a furling’s shoulders pulled away from his, the spine pulling free and arms and legs emerging, then the head coming up and out of Trevor’s, looking down the hill at Zee from its perch on Trevor’s shoulders.
It was huge, for a brand new furling. Usually the size of stray cats, this was fully the size of a German shepherd, and angrier than a furling should have been.
Lizzie had an instinctive reaction that she should run. She felt the hooligans brace to get further away, but no one did. They got lower and they congregated into groups of two and three, but they stayed.
Zee squared up and pounded the ground again. Lizzie squatted to keep hersel
f from toppling as rocks rolled down the sides of the little gully. Trevor twisted his head to the other side and produced another furling.
The first one stood next to him like a sentinel, not responding at all to Zee’s provocation. A furling came running past, looking for mischief, and Trevor’s furling reached out and grabbed it, absorbing it in a motion. The second hopped down to Trevor’s other side.
It was terrifying.
They weren’t tame.
That wasn’t possible.
Wasn’t that what he’d told her?
Zee growled and put his head down like a bull preparing to charge, but instead, a huge furling struggled to break free of Zee’s body, landing on the stones next to him and looking up at Trevor and his furlings.
Lizzie focused on the furling next to Zee, needing to do something, to try to do something.
It turned its feline face to look at her, squatting, and she felt the battle of wills between herself and Zee as she struggled to control it.
He was stronger than she was, but not by as much as she would have expected. The furling tore away from her, charging at Trevor and his furlings, and the pair braced, stepping forward.
Why didn’t he merge them?
Wouldn’t they be better off if they were bigger?
They flanked the bigger furling, one on each side, swiping at it and keeping it spinning as Trevor produced another that leapt directly from his shoulders onto the back of the larger furling.
Horns sounded up above them and Lizzie heard tires break loose of asphalt and a crunch as one car ran into another.
Shouting.
She focused, and she found that there were two hooligans up there, running through the slow-moving traffic.
She smiled.
She didn’t recognize either of them by their form or the way they moved, but they were doing it. This was what they were supposed to do.
For a moment, one of the furlings looked away, and Zee’s furling smashed it, and it was gone, but Trevor had two more already out and attacking it. Zee had his hands spread on the ground in front of him as an even larger furling made a slow, undulating entrance into the world.
Lizzie was too close to it.
And her spot was fading.
She didn’t know if it could eventually just die out, but she didn’t think she would survive getting hit by more than one of Trevor’s furlings, and either of Zee’s would kill her, she was nearly certain.