by Debra Dunbar
“Come on you motherfucking cocksucking son of a bitch,” I snarled at the horse. “That fucking pansy of a Quarter Horse isn’t scared. See? He walked right under that banner. Nothing ate him. Move, you fucker, move.”
Diablo tossed his head, emboldened by my unfavorable comparison between him and the hated Quarter Horse ahead of us. He shuddered one last time, then moved forward with the sort of prancing show-horse step that had the onlookers ooing and ahing.
“Let’s give it up for Santa, folks!” The announcer shouted as we moved under the banner. The people lining the parade route shouted and clapped. At the same moment a gust of wind came out of nowhere, flapping the banner with a loud “snap”.
Diablo completely lost his shit.
I was now riding the equivalent of a rodeo bronco, candy spilling out of my bag as Diablo whirled and kicked, spun and bucked. Parents held eager children back, wisely not letting them run for the candy while there was a risk that Santa’s psycho horse might trample them.
After ten seconds of a wild-ride, Diablo decided that he’d had enough, that the Lisbon Christmas Parade was far too dangerous for a poor little half-demon horse. With one last massive buck, he teleported the fuck out of there, leaving me to crash onto the street, my bag of candy splitting open and spilling its contents like a busted piñata.
Shrieking children descended like flies on shit, half-trampling me in their haste to get to the candy.
My horse did not return. I walked the remains of the parade route, tossing what little candy remained in my bag to the onlookers and wishing I’d brought some booze to drink. When I got back to my house driving an empty horse trailer, I found Diablo in his stall, contentedly munching hay, the traumatizing experience clearly wiped clean from his half-demon pea brain.
It was a traumatizing experience for me as well, mostly because of my fucking shitty horse. I stood in the stable and yelled at him for a while as Piper looked placidly at the pair of us. Then I went inside, crossed that one off my to-do list, poured myself a shot of vodka, and checked on the progress of my eBay purchase.
Chapter 5
The temperature had dropped overnight and I stood shivering on the White House lawn, a smile plastered to my face as an icy breeze ruffled my feathers. At least I didn’t have to get dressed up as Santa for this one, although the organizers had insisted that my wings be visible, and that I appear somewhat angel-like.
Which was why I was standing on the White House Lawn wearing a bikini with feathered wings coming out of my back, huge black horns sprouting from my forehead, and a long arrow-tipped tail snaking around my goose-bump covered legs. I’d thought about doing the cloven-hooved thing, but there was a sweet pair of boots I wanted to wear and they required normal human-type feet. In retrospect, the boots were a good choice. I was fucking cold enough without having to deal with bare feet—hooves or not.
The tree was a monstrosity. I may have had trouble locating a sixty-pound turkey, but the president’s staff were somehow able to secure a pine tree so tall it should have had one of those blinking low-flying airplane warning lights instead of a star at the top. In some weird monochromatic nod to all things expensive, the president had insisted that the entire tree be gold—gold lights, gold tinsel, gold ornaments. They’d even spray-painted the boughs gold. It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen, but I guess some people really like gold.
The Secret Service folk were keeping a good bit of space between me and the head honcho himself, no doubt in part because of my odd non-angelic appearance. Still I got close enough to check him out, just to make sure the guy was really human. One of the big worries brought up in a Ruling Council meeting was that demons would take advantage of their new privileges this side of the gates and go on a bit of a soul-stealing spree, especially targeting various heads of state so they could assume high-level positions and profit by posing as those humans. It was a valid concern. Dar had done that very thing, promptly becoming the Mayor of Chicago. The funny thing was that even after he’d been exposed, the humans in the city didn’t seem to care. I’m not sure what it said about politics in Chicago that having a demon as a mayor didn’t cause anyone to bat an eye. He’d even won last month’s election by a fucking landslide.
I’d turned a blind eye to Dar’s political aspirations because he was my brother and I figured I owed him one. No one else was getting a pass, though. Every demon in Hel knew the price they’d pay if they got caught nabbing the soul of a human in a high political position, but this particular guy had been on every demon’s wish-list since before he’d become president, and I was certain there were plenty of demons that would think he was worth the risk.
I couldn’t get close enough to be positive, but from what I could tell, the President of the United States was human. At least for now.
I took another few steps, just to double check and found myself body blocked by a burly dude bristling with weaponry, his eyes covered by the darkest lens sunglasses I’d ever seen. Seriously? Did the man not realize I was a sorta-angel? That if I wanted to assassinate the president and everyone within a six-block radius I could do it without breaking a sweat, and no amount of bullets would stop me?
Well, they’d certainly slow me down. And piss me off. I’d have to spend as much time and energy fixing all the wounds as I did incinerating, humans, but I could do it.
I eyed Rambo. “You’re not worth the paperwork,” I told him. “And neither is he.”
He glanced at my wings, then my horns. At least I think he did. It was kinda hard to tell with those stupid sunglasses on. “Just following orders,” he told me.
“I never follow orders,” I replied, standing on my tip toes to catch a better glimpse of the Commander in Chief. “Isn’t there supposed to be a photo op of the two of us shaking hands or setting the tree on fire or something? How is that going to happen if we can’t be closer than thirty feet from each other? They gonna use a wide-angle lens or something?”
“Photoshop.”
Dude had a sense of humor. At least I think he was joking.
The caution over the president didn’t seem to extend to his wife. I got to actually stand next to her. She wore the same stiff smile plastered on her face as I did, but had on considerably more clothing. The First Lady was elegantly dressed in, go figure, gold with silver fox fur around the edge of her coat collar. I eyed the fur enviously, wishing I’d opted for a hairy hide instead of my bikini.
“You must be freezing,” she commented in slow, carefully enunciated, accented syllables.
“Demons don’t get cold,” I lied as my teeth chattered.
“You are a demon? I thought they were to send an angel?” She shot me a quick glance. “I thought they were to send the handsome angel with the dark hair and white wings, the one who looks so stern, so powerful, so very muscular in his suit.”
I snorted, amused that the First Lady clearly had the hots for Gabe. I was so going to tease him about that one.
“I’m an angel and a demon,” I told her. “The Iblis.”
“The Satan.” She didn’t appear very frightened by the idea.
“Yeah, although it’s a fairly recent title for me. I’m sorta like a Fallen angel, only I wasn’t alive at the time of the Fall. I’m an Angel of Chaos, so I’m more demon than what you humans would consider to be angel.”
Her gaze drifted over to her husband, who was giving some rambling, longwinded speech about big trees and gold and prosperity and how it was all better and bigger and huger than any tree or gold or prosperity since the dawn of time.
“They think you mean to kill him and take his soul.”
This pronouncement, while not exactly shocking, was delivered in a shockingly unemotional tone of voice. I shot a quick glance her way, then quickly calculated the distance between myself and the president. Gabe would be furious, but the most surefire way to get out of any of these events in the future was by assassinating the ruler of the free world on live television.
“I’ve got enough
paperwork to do,” I said with regret. It would make a boring event pretty damned exciting, but the repercussions would be more than just paperwork. Besides, I didn’t want to ruin Lux’s first Christmas with me being on the outs with his father and all his uncles.
“And now we light the tree,” the president announced, waving his stubby arms about.
I shifted my attention to the giant gold-colored pine, waiting with great anticipation for the whole thing to go up in a giant blaze. Evidently “lighting the tree” was code for something else, much like the human term “stuffed animal” because instead of torching the conifer, someone flicked a switch and the little twinkly gold lights came on. The metallic everything magnified the effect, nearly blinding me. I squinted my eyes, and the crowd oo’d their appreciation for the, in my opinion, disappointing event.
Secret Service guy wasn’t joking about the Photoshop. I got my picture taken with the First Lady, then had to pose with my hand stuck out into the air while the photographers snapped a few more. Then I was dismissed. One more thing to cross off my list.
Thankfully I had an old, somewhat dirty sweatshirt in the trunk of my car which I draped over my shoulders on the drive home. I turned onto the road to my house just as the UPS man did. There were only two houses down here, mine and Wyatt’s, so I drove the whole way with my fingers crossed against the steering wheel, hoping that he was going to mine.
He was. And since I’d received my grocery delivery with the turkeys this morning, I was pretty sure this evening delivery was Lux’s gift from the eBay seller.
It was.
The delivery guy seemed a bit distracted by my bikini attire, but since I’d done away with the visible wings, tail, and horns for the drive home, my appearance didn’t send him running and screaming.
“Warm winter were having here,” I told him even though it was thirty degrees out. “I plan on swimming in my pool later once I break the ice off the surface. Wanna join me?”
He wisely declined, collected my signature, handed me a package then drove off, clearly relieved to be away from the crazy woman in the bikini. I looked down at the box with anticipation, noting that it was somewhat smaller than I’d expected. Ah well. Things never really were as awesome as the marketing guys made them out to be. Hopefully Lux would still like it. Once inside I tossed the package on the dining room table, called out to let Nyalla know I was home, then went upstairs to put on some more weather appropriate clothing.
By the time I came down Nyalla was at the dining room table holding the package.
“Is this what I think it is?” she asked.
“Yup,” I nodded, smug that I’d managed to pull this one off. And it only cost me three thousand dollars too.
“It’s smaller than I thought it would be,” she commented, turning the package over in her hands. “Are you sure you got the right thing?”
A fissure of doubt wormed its way inside of me. “Positive. Super Action Godzilla Droid with Jazz Hands and something else.” I looked around for Lux, remembering that Snip had told me gifts were supposed to be a secret. Which I knew. But I wasn’t very good at keeping secrets, obviously.
“Asta came to pick Lux up for a playdate with Karrae.” She looked up from the package. “I think she’s pregnant.”
“Asta? Or Karrae?”
“Asta, silly. Karrae is a child. She’s just got that look about her, and I know she’s been pestering Dar for another angel.”
She had been, but there were a few things Nyalla was forgetting. “We don’t do ‘pregnant’ Nyalla. There’s no gestation period with beings of spirit. It’s join, donate, form, and voila. Baby angel.”
“Well then I think there’s a join-donate-form date on the calendar, because she’s got that pregnant look, Nyalla insisted.”
Probably. Dar had a hard time saying “no” to Asta. And after she’d looked the other way when he’d taken the soul and form of the Mayor of Chicago, he kinda owed her one. I hoped it would be an Angel of Chaos this time. A little Dar. How diabolically cute would that be?
“Let’s open it.” Nyalla held the package out toward me. “Just to make sure.”
I took it, manifesting a knife-sharp claw so I could cut through the tape and box. My heart fell as I slid the contents out. “This isn’t it, is it?”
I guess someone with an incredible imagination might be able to call this a Godzilla droid. It was a ten-inch plastic Godzilla toy hot glued onto quite possibly the cheapest droid I’d ever seen. I wasn’t sure the thing had enough power to go airborne with the Godzilla attached, but hey, it was the effort that counted, right? As for Super Action, there was no super action, or jazz hands, or anything else at all action-y about this piece of shit I held in my hands.
“Oh, Sam.” Nyalla actually had tears in her eyes.
“I know. I really screwed the pooch with this one. Lux is going to hate me. I’m the worst angel-mother ever. This is almost as bad as him nearly being chopped up by the chipper shredder. This is worse than the time he drowned, or the time he got electrocuted, or the time he choked on a hot dog, or the time he jumped off the roof and broke his neck, or the time—”
“Oh, Sam.”
Nyalla wrapped her arms around me, crushing the shitty Super Action Godzilla Droid wannabe against my chest. I heard a piece of plastic break.
“You tried so hard. You stalked that auction like a pro. Gabe told me how you ignored the entire Ruling Council meeting because you wanted to win this thing for Lux. He was annoyed, but I thought that was you being a great mother. You spent three thousand dollars trying to get Lux the toy he wanted. That’s…that’s a bit excessive, but it still shows how much you care. I’m so proud of you.”
I’d made Nyalla proud. But as much as that thrilled me, I was still upset because I’d failed to get my kid the toy he wanted for Christmas. I’d failed. And although Lux would put on a brave face and tell me it was okay, I knew he’d be disappointed. I knew he’d be sad.
The thought of Lux being sad broke my heart.
Chapter 6
I spent that evening scouring the internet for any Super Action Godzilla Droid there was to be found. If I had to teleport up to the fucking North Pole and strangle an elf for one of these things, I was prepared to do it. I was so desperate I even tried to track down possible shipments of the toys, thinking I could hijack a truck and steal one off the back.
“I thought we were going to watch a movie,” Gregory complained. “You promised Lux we’d make popcorn and see the one about the human who is about to attempt suicide. I’m not sure why such a grim topic is fit for a young angel to see, but Lux is insisting.”
I knew Gregory would totally approve of It’s a Wonderful Life once he’d seen it. An angel saving a human from the sin of suicide? Absolutely appropriate for a young angel to see.
“I’m almost done,” I told him. “Go get the popcorn ready. And bring in a six-pack of beer.” If I was going to sit through a saccharine movie with no sex, no cursing, and not even the guy splatting himself over a bridge, then I was going to need booze.
It didn’t take long for an angel to prepare popcorn and get beer. Just as Gregory was about to get seriously irritated, I found what I was looking for. There was a toy store in Atlanta that had an undisclosed number of the coveted, impossible-to-get toys. And they were going to give them away in two days to the first lucky people lined up outside their doors as they opened. I made a note of the address, jotted down the store’s hours of operation, and shut my laptop to join my angel and my kid on the couch. Movie tonight. More human-style Christmas shit with Lux tomorrow, then I’d head over to this place to scope it out. Hopefully within the next thirty-six hours, I’d have the toy in hand and Lux would have the best Christmas ever.
We inched forward in the line, me a bit groggy after last night’s It’s a Wonderful Life turned into a festival of holiday-themed movies that went on into the wee hours of the morning. I’d gotten two hours of sleep. So had Lux, but in typical angel fashion, he seeme
d to have less need of sleep than I did.
All the humans stared at my golden-haired child as we stood in line, more entranced than they usually were at the sight of an angel. Lux preened, soaking in all the admiration. We inched our way forward, the little angel unusually excited about this whole thing.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I muttered, hating that I was wasting hours standing in line to see some rent-a-Santa. “Let’s bail and go get ice cream instead.”
“No.” Lux actually stomped his little foot, causing the nearby humans to adore him even more. “Want to see Uncle Gimlet.”
Fuck. I’d momentarily forgotten about that whole Santa-Satan thing. How did Lux even know about that? Clearly he’d been spending more time in Gimlet’s company than I’d been aware of. It hadn’t bothered me one bit that my adopted angel child had seen through the Gimlet/Samael’s guise long before I had, but Uncle Gimlet? I hadn’t seen Samael since that time Gregory had broken every rule and crossed the gates to Hel to visit his brother. I got the impression Lux had since him since then. Often.
“This isn’t Uncle Gimlet, it’s a human Santa,” I told him. “It’s a human pretending to be Santa.” That got me all sorts of glares from the nearby parents, so I backpedaled a bit. “I mean, it’s a magical non-angel, non-demon Santa, because Santa is magic and can be everywhere at once figuring out who is good and who is bad and deciding who should get toys in their stocking on Christmas Day.”
Lux frowned. “Krampus?”
How the fuck did he know Krampus?
“No, it’s not Krampus, or Uncle Gimlet, it’s a human Santa.” I looked around at the other kids. “Nyalla wants you to have an awesome first Christmas, just like human children have. This is what human children do—they go to the mall and sit on a human Santa’s lap and tell him what they want for Christmas. Then on Christmas Eve, they hang their stockings by the fireplace, set out milk and cookies for Santa, and when they wake up in the morning, they have presents.”