The Angel's Fire

by Holley Trent

  They must have been extremely valuable for him to still be there. He was straining under the heft of them. Each crate sank the wagon’s wheels another few millimeters into the ground with its weight.

  “Hurry!” his wife called out, dramatically fanning herself.

  She faced no imminent threat from the blaze. Lola hadn’t yet crossed the street. He doubted she even would if she didn’t need to. She was too practical.

  Tarik shoved the end of his sword into the ground behind the wagon and grabbed the sheriff under the arms before he could realize he was there.

  Of course, Sheriff Nickerson threw his elbows and kicked at him like any scared animal would. Self-preservation had kicked in.

  “Where are you going?” Tarik asked him.

  In his periphery, he caught the sight of someone swooning and hitting the ground. More cacophony from the displaced residents. More complaints of unfairness.

  Scoffing, he gave the sheriff a hard shake and tossed him down to the dust.

  The pale-faced snake skittered back, calling out, “Freda, get my guns!”

  His bride grabbed the reins of the team of horses and managed to get them moving after four tries. The wagon wasn’t completely connected, though. In thirty feet, the team was barreling down the trail unguided and the sheriff’s bride had been tossed off her perch with the wagon crashing to a halt behind her.

  Tarik heard a dry laugh behind him.

  Somehow, the sheriff’s face managed to go even paler.

  Tarik didn’t have to turn to see who it was. He could feel the heat pouring off her. Primordial fire. Life-giving heat—or destruction—depending on her whims.

  She’d been so good. Maybe she’d grown weary of being good.

  The sheriff gulped as Lola knelt beside him and studied him intently through the hollows in her form that passed for eyes. She wasn’t a flame anymore, but instead, the vague shape of a woman, shifting colors between blue-white, yellow, orange, and red. Her scent was the cloying perfume of roasted fruits and honey. Sweet and intoxicating. A beautiful threat of danger, and Tarik had crossed her the wrong way. He knew that because she was ignoring him.

  She tipped the sheriff’s chin up with two fingers and tilted her head. “I gave you…so many chances,” she said. “My fault. Lately, I always give too many chances, and rarely do I prosper for doing so.”

  She withdrew her hand and stood, staring into the distance where the horses had gone.

  The sheriff was frozen in the position she’d arranged him into. Perhaps he was afraid to move. Perhaps she’d done something to him to prevent him from being able to.

  “What kind of nightmare are you?” the sheriff asked though labored breaths.

  Lola kept staring into the distance. The fiery coloring lapping at her edges abated somewhat, revealing the thin lines of her chemise. She was raising hell in her underwear.

  Tarik would have smiled if the situation hadn’t been so grave.

  She didn’t answer the sheriff. She walked to his wife who was sobbing beside the collapsed carriage and gave her a hard slap that shut her up fast. “You cannot play both the innocent and the vanquished here. Pick one. Make it the right one for your own sake because everyone here knows all your lies.

  The woman looked around her in a hurry, likely in search of peer, confidante, or savior, but there were only enemies. Rachel crouched near her wearing a “try me” look. Cougars chased down the familiar brutes who’d likely been terrorizing the territory for the better part of a year. Horses fled. Dogs barked.

  A useless husband gawped.

  An impatient fallen angel passed his sword from hand to hand.

  And there was an irate goddess who’d had enough.

  Lola’s pat on the top of the woman’s head made her start crying again.

  “Aren’t you going to rescue her, Sheriff?” Rachel asked mockingly.

  “Can’t…move.”

  “Liar!” his wife called out. “Do something!”

  Rachel lifted an eyebrow. “She tried to abandon you in your hour of need, Sheriff. She was gonna take the money and run, huh?”

  A burnt-out building crashed to the ground but neither Rachel nor Lola turned to see.

  “All that missing gold.” Rachel crooked her thumb toward the wagon and the jail. “From the newspapers months ago. It’s all here. Lord knows how long he’s had it.”

  Freda blinked with disingenuous confusion. “I don’t understand. Gold, you say?”

  “Don’t even try it,” Rachel quipped. “Maybe you came here expectin’ to find something that didn’t really exist, but you had to find out quickly enough that that man wasn’t good for the long-distance promises he made to you. But he figured out a way to satisfy you, anyway, didn’t he?”

  Silvio must have thrown his weight around enough to clear the overprotective Cougars out of his path. He stepped from the sidewalk onto the road and knelt beside the sheriff. He snapped his fingers and pointed at him. “Up close, he’s familiar. Seen him somewhere before.”

  The sheriff flinched.

  “Ah. I know now. I was locked up for a couple of weeks in Denver a few years ago.” He gave the sheriff a poke. “He was in there, too.”

  “You shouldn’t tell such lies!” Freda said.

  Lola tapped the top of her head again and sent the woman collapsing to the ground. Freda was barely able to hold herself up on her forearms. Her mouth was contorted into an ugly sneer as she tried, and failed, to force words through her lips.

  “Yeah, he was there,” Silvio said. “Fraud, I think the charge was. Was shacking up with a rich lady there, and she was thinking he was some kind of oil baron. I guess he couldn’t make good on his promises and she found out.”

  “Huh,” Tarik spat. He was suddenly curious of who the Marshals’ witness of the called gold thief who looked so much like Tarik must have been. Perhaps the witness was the thief, and perhaps he was the same creature Tarik had just thrown on the ground.

  “I grow bored,” Lola said. “And I am tired and hungry.” The fire completely receded from her and her usual, familiar loveliness came into dim view. With all the light gone, Tarik could barely see her in the dark. She wasn’t really trying to be seen, however. She was moving and ignoring the awestruck, wide-eyed stares from the humans on the ground.

  She spun to Silvio. “Find Patience Elsbrook and my old cook Bertha. Tell them to rally the other witches and get them in here to soften the memories of the humans in town. They live near the mill.”

  He took off without a word.

  To Rachel, she said, “Have the Cougars journey out and corral anyone on the roads out of here. Don’t let them leave until we know they won’t remember anything.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Slowly, she turned to Tarik.

  He fell to his knees so she could look him in the eyes. It seemed the appropriate thing to do.

  She took a few steps toward him and stopped.

  He heard it. The plaintive cry of a baby.

  And saw it. The wetness blooming at the front of her chemise in response.

  Elizabeth was on a veranda upwind of all the smoke holding a bundle in her arms.

  Something told him that pit in his gut—that void in his body was caused by that. It tugged at him and dragged him to his feet like a magnet specially made to be his master.

  He took a step toward the woman and the bundle.

  Lola put a tower of fire in front of him.

  He could have walked through, being what he was, but he accepted the warning without thought.

  She put her hands on her hips. Her eyes were flinty and narrowed, her breath coming and going in erratic draws and puffs. Cheeks glowing red as a New Mexican sunset.

  “You did something to me,” she said in a voice too quiet for anyone but him to hear. “What did you do?”

  He was only half listening. He couldn’t pay attention when Elizabeth was so visible.

  She pounded his chest and screamed, “What did you do?�
��

  “I…loved you. That’s all.”

  She shook her head hard. “You want to undo me. You want me to fade and disappear like so many of my kind who came before me, and I will not.”

  “What are you talking about, woman? If that is my child—”

  “There should be no child. Do you understand that? I am not like human women. I should not be able to—”

  “I am not a human man, Butterfly.”

  The statement brought her up short, so he repeated it so she’d understand.

  “I am not a human man and I am not of your kind. Why do you try to make sense of things that are new and cannot be fathomed? Why do you try to distance yourself from things that can change you for the better?”

  “Like you?” She scoffed and tossed her heavy curtain of hair over her shoulders. “You reek of death and anger. The taint is so heavy on you that your involvement had to have been recent. Or extreme. Who did you kill and why?”

  “I—”

  “It does not matter,” she said before he could get the words out. “What you say does not matter to me one whit. You tell me lies. You do not change. You are what you are, and I knew that from the start.”

  “What lie did I tell you?” he bellowed. He didn’t understand her fickleness and couldn’t make sense of why she was angry if she wasn’t going to give him a chance to explain. He had changed for her. For the first time in his long existence, he’d wanted to stay someplace, and not because the place was so comfortable. He’d wanted to be there because that was where she was.

  He knew he’d lost when she shook her head and turned her back on him.

  The witches she called for looked at him with skepticism as they drew near her.

  His was attention was pulled between their harried whispers and Elizabeth’s apologetic expression as he started toward her for a better look of that small thing tugging psychically at him.

  And then the witches were in front of him, Lola at their backs.

  “It would be better…if you forgot this place,” she said.

  “What?” he asked, thoroughly confused.

  “Forget this place,” she said with a tremble in her voice. “Forget it and forget me.”

  “Why would I want to forget you? I’m not going anywhere, Lola.”

  “You are. You must.”

  She took a deep breath and said to the witches, “Leave the sheriff and his wife where they are until morning. I will deal with them then. Let them spend the night in the smoke.”

  “And Tarik?” Bertha asked.

  Lola nodded. “Go ahead.”

  “What about Tarik?” Tarik shouted.

  Before he could think to do anything—to grab his sword, or to vanish away to some other realm, or to simply run—Bertha took his hand and gave it a tender squeeze.

  “Sorry, honey,” she said. “Sometimes, a lady’s gotta do what she has to, to not make the same mistake twice. You’ll understand some day.”

  She gave his hand a squeeze and smiled in a matronly way that made him smile. So did Patience.

  “Understand what?” he asked, furrowing his brow.

  Why did he smell smoke?

  He looked about him and saw the fire. Saw a few Cougars idling nearby as though it were nothing.

  Huh. These old buildings can’t be trusted.

  Weird place, but he’d seen stranger.

  He sheathed his sword and stepped away from the strangers. “What is this place? How did I get here?”

  Gulielmus must have been playing tricks again. Tarik was going to de-feather that bastard as soon as he saw him.

  “No place you need to worry about,” the tall skinny woman said. “Go on home. We’ll pretend we didn’t see you.”

  He laughed. “Thank you, ladies. I must have gotten turned around while transporting myself. I’m sure things will seem clearer soon.”

  “No worries. We get all twisted up sometimes, too. Can’t seem to avoid it nowadays.”

  “That’s for sure.” Tarik mentally targeted his friend Gulielmus’s apartment and took the leap.

  Why am I so tired?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Bermuda

  Two and a Half Years Ago

  Tarik dug his fingers deep into the dense crown of his dreadlocks and rolled his gaze towards the heavens.

  He hated having a phone. Hated being accessible, actually. Things had been far easier back when the only way for people had to find him was to trace his energy. Given how guarded he was of his time, he’d been giving special care to obscuring his whereabouts.

  “How do they even get my number?” he asked Tamatsu.

  Tamatsu looked up from the trough of pink sand he’d been idly swirling his fingers through and shrugged.

  “One of Gulielmus’s boys. They need the three of us to close a portal.”

  Tamatsu’s brow creased.

  “Somewhere in New Mexico.”

  Another shrug from his friend.

  Tarik turned woke up his phone screen and glanced at the time. He had a few hours to waste. They wouldn’t need to collect Gulielmus and head to the coordinates for another day, and there was something Tarik needed to do.

  For years, he’d been feeling a certain kind of tug whenever he traveled past that little island. He’d started to think there was some truth to the old stories about the Bermuda Triangle being a fount of disaster, and he had to investigate that urgent call from the place.

  He’d brought Tamatsu along just for the hell of it. His friend needed a break from scouring the globe for his shifty ex, anyway.

  The closer Tarik got, however, the more he realized the tug wasn’t from a thing, but a person. That person was like a beacon, calling out to him, making him pay attention, though he didn’t know what it was he was supposed to be paying attention to.

  He’d triangulated where they were and was going to go knock on the door and find out what the hell they wanted.

  “Probably a trap,” he muttered. He stood and shook the sand off his long coat and cargo pants. “Someone who thinks they’ve finally found a way to eliminate me. Some vengeful angel.”

  Tamatsu nodded sagely.

  “Whoever it is, I have to eradicate them first. The distraction is wearying.”

  His friend indicated his stomach and pointed to a barbecue stand up the beach.

  Tarik grinned. “Of course. Feed your belly. I’ll circle back to collect you.”

  Hunger was one of Tamatsu’s curses. While Tarik avoided the mess and inconvenience of food whenever he could, Tamatsu had nonstop urgent cravings for it. He worked to eat and then ate so he could work. It was a never-ending cycle with him. Some people would have called that hell, but fortunately, Tamatsu didn’t mind the food so much. He had a very adventurous palate.

  Tamatsu hustled to the little restaurant at the edge of the beach.

  Tarik took the path up the road into Hamilton.

  He hadn’t been to Bermuda in ages. Hadn’t had a reason to.

  The last time he’d been there—

  Huh. Have I been here?

  He never forgot a memory, but he actually couldn’t recall having been there. He just knew he had been.

  He stopped on the path, annoying a couple of beachgoers behind him. Grunting, he moved out of the way and gave his apologies. He knew he looked out of place. It was hot as hell and he wore way too many layers. The extra clothing was the only way for him to keep his weapons shielded without using magic.

  He seemed to remember, suddenly, that the last time he’d been to Bermuda, he was making arrangements for someone. He couldn’t remember who that someone was.

  Agitated, he stormed up the path, continuing on toward his target. Someone had fucked with his memory. That was becoming increasingly obvious. Angels may have been hard to kill but tinkering with their perceptions was a simple feat for people with the right magic. Their bodies may have been machines, but their minds were supposed to be innocent. They weren’t designed to protect themselves from pointe
d manipulation.

  He had no way of knowing who’d done it, or when, or why, but he was going to find out.

  Maybe it had something to do with that beacon calling out to him.

  He walked about half a mile against traffic, his target evidently near a little purple cottage set up high on an overlook to the beach.

  The cottage was on a tidy lot with a yard crowded with tropical flowers and with a welcome sign painted with the name “Delacroix” on the bottom.

  Why is that familiar?

  Without pause, he trod up the walkway to the little house and knocked on the door.

  “Shh!” came a voice from inside.

  “The windows are open,” came another. “I think they heard you.”

  The first woman uttered, “Drat.”

  “Might as well see who it is,” came the second voice again.

  “Aren’t you tired of visitors this week?”

  A giggle. “Yes, but I dislike the alternative, so I endure.”

  Tarik creased his brow, wondering what the alternative could be.

  The soft patter of light footsteps sounded from the opposite end of the house to the front door. Halfway there, though, Tarik noted the unusual loudness of the person’s energy, and then their scent immediately after.

  Not human. Some kind of shifter. Not a Wolf, though. He knew plenty of those. They rolled deep as cornfields in eastern North Carolina.

  “Oh no,” the woman whispered, halting just on the other side of the door.

  “You may as well open it,” Tarik said, “now that you know you’ve a visitor.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I’m not selling anything.”

  “I never said you were. How did you find this place?”

  “I walked right up to it. You see, the house is not exactly hidden.” He shifted his weight and took a breath. “Obviously at this point, you know that I’m not human, and you know that I know that you aren’t, either. Let’s dispense with the song and dance, shall we? I just want to know what’s pulling me here. The tug has been frustrating me for over a hundred years and I would like some peace.”

  She sighed.

  He heard soft banging at the center of the door—the distinctive din of someone tapping their forehead against it repeatedly.