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Willow looked at the two chairs. “Here, why don’t the two of you sit at the table, and we’ll take the bed?” she suggested to the agents. Smoothing her hair back, she quickly tied it into a knot.
“Call us Sophie and Nate, please,” said Agent Kinney as she took a seat.
Alex propped his rifle against the wall without responding. He had no intention of getting chummy with these two until he knew what was going on. He grabbed the unpacked T-shirt he’d left out for the day and pulled it on, then sat beside Willow on the bed, leaning against the wall and tapping his fingers on his knee.
“How did you find us?” he asked.
“Remote viewing,” said Nate. “I’ve been trying to get a psychic fix on you for weeks; it’s not easy when there’s no personal attachment. Finally I saw that you were up in the mountains somewhere. I kept thinking it was the Rockies; I wasted almost a week scanning them before moving farther west. ”
Willow’s eyes widened. “But if you can do that, then the other angels can, too. ”
“It’s a specialized skill, but I’m sure they’re trying,” agreed Nate. “You’re just lucky that we found you first. ”
“We’re lucky,” said Sophie. “Though it would have saved a lot of time if we hadn’t lost you outside of Phoenix. ”
“That was you following us on the interstate?” asked Willow.
Nate nodded. “I’ve got contacts in the Church of Angels; I heard through the grapevine that a couple of devotees almost got you in Texas — for a while after that, we were only a few steps behind you. ”
“Kudos to both of you, by the way, for keeping alive so far,” put in Sophie. “It’s quite an achievement. ”
Willow shook her head. “It’s all been Alex,” she said. “I’d have been dead the first day if it wasn’t for him. ”
“You saved me, too,” said Alex quietly, thinking of their battle with the angels in New Mexico. Their gaze met, and then he turned back to the agents. “How long has Project Angel been infiltrated?”
“About four months,” said Nate. “Some of the agents in the field had already died or been subject to angel burn by that point. The rest were dispatched by the angels or are now missing, presumed dead. ”
Alex had known it already, but it was like a hard kick to the chest anyway. He saw Willow dart him a concerned look, her eyes full of sympathy. “Right,” he said finally. “So how come I wasn’t dispatched?”
Nate gave a sad smile. “Because you were the best. So the angels decided to use you for their own purposes — doing away with traitors like me. ”
Alex’s spine straightened as he came away from the wall. “What?”
“That’s right,” said Sophie. “For the past four months, every hit you’ve done has been an angel sympathetic to humans, who was working to help save them. ”
“You’re insane,” he said shortly. “I watch them, remember? Every single one was about to feed. ”
Nate shook his head. “No, they were going to do something called marshaling, where they place psychic resistance into a human’s aura. It can act as a protection against feeding angels. In the right conditions, it can also be passed on to other humans through auric contact — almost like a virus, but with positive effects. ”
Alex’s mind raced. He thought back to his last hit before he’d received the order for Willow: T. Goodman, approaching the drunken businessman on the sidewalk. Don’t be afraid. I have something to give to you.
He swore. Distantly, he felt Willow take his hand; he gripped her fingers.
Sophie crossed her legs. “You had no way of knowing, of course; you were just doing your job — excellently as always, I might add. ”
He felt like throwing something at her. “Great, so there’s this thing called marshaling, and no one even bothered to tell me about it? So that I could maybe not kill angels who are on our side? Jesus! How exactly did you guys manage to lose control of things so badly? No, scratch that — how did you even get your jobs in the first place?”
Sophie sat impassively. “The angel spotters were aware of this information for the past year, which is how long Nate’s been with us. None of the hits authorized by us since that time were against sympathetic angels. And probably very few prior to that; there just aren’t that many of them. ”
Alex let out a breath. Willow was still holding his hand; the steady warmth of her touch calmed him somewhat. “OK,” he said after a pause. He squeezed Willow’s hand then released it and scraped his face. “Sorry. ”
Sophie inclined her head. “If this news didn’t bother you, then you wouldn’t have been fit for the job in the first place. ”
Nate leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. “Look, we need to deal with what’s going on right now, not with the past. If we don’t act quickly, things are about to get a whole lot worse. Which brings us to the next point. ” He paused as his gaze went to Willow, taking her in. “So, it really is true that you’re a half angel,” he said.
“Yes, it is. ” Her voice was quiet, steady. Remembering her anguish in the desert the month before, Alex felt a rush of love and admiration for her.
“I knew it already, but actually seeing it for myself is . . . ” Nate trailed off. “You should be impossible, you know. ”
Willow smiled slightly. “Here I am anyway. ”
“Do you know why the angels think you can destroy them?” he asked.
“No. I don’t have any idea. Before all of this, I didn’t even know that there were angels, much less that I was a half one. ”
“Well, I know a little more than you, then,” said Nate. “Among the angel community, the consensus is that Paschar’s vision had something to do with the gate. ”
“Start at the beginning,” interrupted Sophie, her crossed leg jiggling.
“Right,” said Nate, linking his fingers together. “The first thing you have to understand is that most angels in this world are here because of something called the Crisis. Our world is similar to yours, except that there we can feed off the ether itself. Being a predator isn’t our natural state. ”
“Yeah? You give a great imitation of it,” said Alex before he could stop himself. Willow gave him a glance.
Nate shrugged. “It’s true, there have always been angels who liked to come across here and feed off humans. They liked the buzz, the excitement of it. But their numbers were relatively few, overall. You’ll just have to trust me when I say that most angels had no interest in it. However, then the Crisis came — though no one knows why, our ether started to fade. Currently there’s no longer enough energy left to support all of us, and it’s getting worse. Soon our world won’t be able to sustain any of us at all. ”
Alex listened intently. They’d been right, then — something had gone wrong in the angels’ world, bringing them to this one.
“The Seraphic Council decided that our only hope was to start an evacuation. ” Nate’s eyes flicked to Alex’s. “To here. ”
“The Invasion,” said Alex.
“The Invasion,” confirmed Nate. He took a breath, tapping his fingers together. When he spoke again, he sounded as if he was choosing his words carefully. “The evacuation has been planned in waves. What you call the Invasion was the first; there are still several more to come. ”
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