Like lawsuits filed by injured people when wild animals behaved like, shock of shocks, wild animals? I’d bet money on it. “Personally, I believe in live and let live,” I said, “and if this is their territory, so be it. But he was looking like he wanted to make dinner out of my friend.”
She nodded. “Despite the news reports, mountain lions don’t often attack humans. They’ll go after dogs who’re turned off-lead, but even that doesn’t happen much. Usually if the drought’s bad enough to drive them down looking for water, but that hasn’t been the case lately. Possibly this one was rabid.” She turned her head in Remi’s direction, frowned a little. “You look familiar. But I don’t think we’ve met . . . have we? I think I’d remember you—wait a minute!” She pointed a forefinger, repeatedly poked the air in his direction. “You were in the Zoo Club the other night, weren’t you? And you sang ‘Ave, Maria,’ which I don’t think I’ve ever actually heard sung in a cowboy bar before.” She grinned, and it lit up her face. Pretty girl, if not downright beautiful. “Weird choice, maybe, but a nice job.”
Remi dipped his head slightly. “That’s kindly of you, miss I do appreciate it.”
She smiled briefly at him, then knelt to dig through her daypack and came up with a large resealable plastic bag and a hand-brush. Remi and I watched her kneel again, open the bag’s mouth wide, then begin to sweep the burned bits of dead demon into the bag.
Quietly, I reached down and picked up the revolver. Remi and I in unison faded back a few strides, exchanged glances. He tipped his head in a gesture I interpreted as ‘no certainty but better safe than sorry,’ and I saw the blade of a Hibben throwing knife in his hand even as I lifted the .357 and cradled it in two hands. I didn’t point it directly at her, but on an angle toward the ground. It crossed my mind to wonder whether I needed to blow on the bullets again, or if it was one-and-done.
“I didn’t realize Park Rangers carried sidearms,” I said.
She didn’t look back over her shoulder, just kept brushing dead bug-things into her bag. “I’m not actually on duty. I came out because of the earthquake. It’s all-hands-on-deck when natural disasters occur. This is a popular area, so best to check for hikers. But some of us carry, yeah.” She stopped sweeping, stood up as she squeezed the bag’s ribbing closed, ran her fingers along it to snap-seal it. She turned casually to face the two of us. Turned out the braid, as it swung free of the jacket, had a bright blonde streak running through it. “The National Park Service does authorize us to act as law enforcement officers—” And then she stopped talking altogether and stared at us.
Remi and I stood side-by-side but not so close as to encumber one another. We were clearly poised to act, and of course I had a very large gun in my hands. I quoted the demon we’d met in the Zoo’s parking lot. “‘Everyone comes home?’”
She didn’t blink. She didn’t speak. She didn’t so much as twitch. Just stared at me, sealed plastic bag in one hand. The other hand was empty. Unless she was left-handed or ambidextrous, her gun hand was occupied. Besides, you don’t try for a fast draw from behind your back, particularly from under a jacket.
“It’s just a 9-mil SIG Sauer,” she said with careful clarity, letting no aggression color her tone. “Not enough gun against your cannon. I don’t particularly want my head blown off, so I’m not going to try anything. But I would like to ask you what the problem is.”
I always got a kind of ironic amusement out of it when people felt their smaller caliber weapon was no match for a larger. A gun was a gun, a bullet a bullet, and you could die from a .22 round to the head as quickly as from a .357. Though certainly less messily.
I said, “Remi.”
He took two smooth paces sideways, then began to circle around behind her. He’d lift that automatic from her and then maybe we could have a more casual conversation.
Except before Remi could reach her and slip the gun free, lightning shot low across the sky, lit up the mountain, and a crack of thunder exploded so close overhead that all of us jumped in surprise.
I dove right, ducking behind the stump; Remi dove left behind a broken pine; and she took several long steps backward and dropped down behind another downed tree. The SIG now resided in her hand.
To some extent we all of us had cover, so to speak; that is, we weren’t entirely exposed, any of us. But Remi was in no position to dump a knife at her without showing way too much upper body, and while I could poke my head around the edge of the stump just enough to see her tree and the yellow glow of her rain suit amidst the gray of the day, it was easy enough to flush me into the open with a few well-placed bullets shot into my stump. The young woman, on the other hand, couldn’t really take a clear shot without exposing herself.
And then the blackened skies opened up, sluicing rain upon us, and we all three of us held a standoff while lying on our bellies in dirt and deadfall. Within seconds I was soaked and mud-soggy while lightning strobed directly overhead and thunder deafened us.
* * *
—
In the movies, they don’t generally stage gunfights or Mexican standoffs in the pouring rain. I mean, probably it would mess with the actual filming, and possibly even in real life the participants in imminent gun battles would do their best to avoid bad weather if at all possible. And it was completely understandable, because here all three of us hugged the earth in the midst of torrential rain, soaked to the skin with clothing practically glued to us.
And then it began to hail.
“Fuck,” I muttered. Then raised my voice. “Remi!”
“What?”
“You can hear me?”
“Since I just answered you, yes, I can hear you!”
Wiseass. I squinted through the hail. “Can’t you tell if she is, or isn’t a . . . well, you know.” I was pretty sure yelling in the middle of a hailstorm about demons and angels would mark me as certifiable, especially if she were just a normal human woman.
“No!” Remi yelled.
Wetter by the moment. “You know, it’s not much help, your supposed superpower, if you can’t actually use it!” Ow. Dammit. Ow. The hail was not small. It bounced hard off wet clothing and the skin beneath. I wondered if I’d bruise. “Can you try again?”
“I did! I can’t tell if she’s either one!” Remi shouted back.
Her turn. “Either one what?” she shouted. “Who are you?”
I ignored her question and shouted to Remi again. “If she was in the Zoo when you sang the other night, she’d have reacted, right?” I saw the peak of her blue cap show itself above the fallen tree she’d taken shelter behind. “Stay put!” I yelled at her.
She did stay put, but an arm came up and tossed something glinting out in the open. It landed near Remi. “My badge!” she shouted.
Another bolt of lightning cut across the sky very close to us. I hunkered down as low as possible, shoulders hunched up high, placed one spread hand over my left ear. Holy shit, that thunder was loud!
It was Remi’s turn. “Why do you want that stuff?” he shouted at her. “Why collect burned bits of—things?”
“To find out what it is!” she yelled back. “I’ve never seen anything like it, okay? I want to take it to the university, see an entomologist I know!”
It all made perfect sense. Except if a surrogate was riding her, it would know how to make perfect sense.
“Gabe?”
“Yeah?”
“Be ready!”
Be ready for—? And then as he raised his voice and began reciting, I knew what to be ready for.
I peered around my stump. We were out of the thick of the trees, on the verge of the lava flow, but there was a fringe of vegetation. I could see no part of the woman, and I would have, had she tried to move away, especially wearing bright yellow.
After another crack of thunder, she raised her voice. It had gone up in pitch. “Why are you shouting t
he Rite of Exorcism at me?”
Hah, I thought. “So you know what that is!”
“Because I like horror movies, and I heard him singing it just the other night!”
Remi was still reciting, but he eased forward two short steps, bent and picked up the item she claimed was a badge. Then abruptly his recitation stilled. His tone sounded odd. “Your name’s MJ Kelly?”
Oh. My. God. I raised my voice over the storm. “Mary Jane Kelly?”
She sounded half-baffled, half-annoyed. “Yes!”
I shook my head. “It’s too neat!” I shouted at Remi. “Too much of a coincidence!”
Remi shouted back, “I can’t get a read on her!”
I felt pummeled beneath the hail. It was known to dent cars. I was flesh, not metal. “Try the rite again!”
“Are you going to shoot me?” she yelled.
Remi was busy calling out the Latin, so I answered. “Are you going to shoot me?”
“I don’t want to shoot anyone!” she shouted back. “I came out to see if any hikers needed help after the earthquake!” And then she muttered something about the fucking hail, and the ridiculousness of the situation.
Admittedly it was pretty ridiculous.
“I got nothing!” Remi shouted. “You see any kind of reaction?”
“Who are you?” she shouted.
“Okay, look!” I shouted. “Let’s put our guns down, step away from them. I’m miserable, you’re miserable, and Remi’s miserable, so yeah, let’s get under cover and discuss all of this.” Discuss a whole helluva lot, in fact, with Ms. Mary Jane Kelly, who appeared to be in possession of both her kidneys. “Look.” I stuck my arm out and allowed the revolver to dangle from the trigger guard. “I’ll set it down. You do the same with yours, okay?” I placed the .357 on the stump, slowly pushed up to my feet. I was sopping wet, and chilled. Probably if I tried for the gun, wet clothes would bind me. I didn’t stand up straight because it’s hard not to wince from massive thunderclaps. I just kind of hunched there, hail bouncing off my head. But I had insurance in Remi, which was the reason I was willing to put down my gun. She didn’t.
“Step away!” she called.
I took two steps, hands up, fingers spread. I saw a yellow-sleeved arm come over the top of the downed tree, and she placed the SIG in the open. Slowly, carefully she stood up, staring at me. Because she had not had time to zip up her jacket, the shirt beneath it was wet and muddy. Her braid hung nearly to her waist from the opening in the back of the ball cap.
Then her expression changed completely, and she scooped up the gun.
“Oh, shit—” I dropped to the ground belly-down as she raised the SIG Sauer.
Guess that answered the question about who—or what—she was.
CHAPTER TEN
Remi did not throw his knife. He threw a rock.
It smacked into the ranger’s hand and ruined her shot. As she cried out in surprise, he made a leap at her and knocked her flat on her rain-suited ass before she could fire the SIG Sauer. He came up with her gun, dumped the clip, tossed them in two different directions while she sat there in the muck, white-faced and staring, holding her hand.
I hitched up on my elbows. “Remi—”
But he began shouting ‘No!’ Loudly. Repeatedly. And he was waving both arms around like a crazed man trying frantically to avert a tragedy.
She wasn’t looking at me. He wasn’t looking at me. He wasn’t even looking at her.
I lunged for and grabbed the .357 off the stump, turned on my knees, saw why Ranger Mary Jane Kelly was so white-faced and speechless, and why Remi was waving arms and shouting.
Well. Yeah. Possibly emptying a clip at—or into—an angel is not a wise idea.
Shemyazaz, dripping charred flesh, displaying his lipless mouth and skeletal rictus, came dancing his way out of the trees. He didn’t quite pirouette, as he had atop the bar, but he definitely wasn’t walking.
Remi hadn’t been yelling to stop her from shooting me, or Shemyazaz. He’d been trying to stop Shemyazaz from harming her. Just in case it might occur to the angel to do so, since a woman had been on the verge of shooting bullets at him. Into him.
The ruined angel paused at the demarcation between forest and open area. He tipped back his charred head and stared up at the skies above aspens and broken pines. Then he put out a blackened hand, caught a hailstone, brought it to his mouth. Licked it. His tongue was bright red in the burned cavern of his mouth.
His wings lifted away from his body. They were in no better shape than the rest of him, shredded, cracked, weeping bright lava-like streaks and globs. They stretched high, and he shook them, mantling like a bird taking a bath.
His voice cut easily through the noise of the storm, clear and ringing. “I haven’t tasted the earth in so long!”
Since Remi had committed to protecting her against a whackjob angel, I figured he had sorted out that the ranger was okay. “She good?”
“She’s good,” he answered.
I took two steps, bent and caught hold of Mary Jane Kelly’s arm, urged her up from the ground. “It’s okay,” I told her. “It’s okay.” Of course it wasn’t okay, but I didn’t know what else to say. I was pretty sure ‘Look, he’s a fallen Grigori who slept with human women back before Biblical times and made Nephilim, and then he went to hell with Lucifer to pal around with him until the devil got jealous of his beauty and decided to make him ugly’ wouldn’t go over well. Instead, I scowled at Remi. “I thought Ganji had him!”
“He did!”
“Well, he doesn’t now!”
“It’s not my job to keep track of either one of them!”
Mary Jane Kelly ‘s eyes were wide. “What is that?”
Well, hell. “He’s a fallen Grigori who slept with human women back before Biblical times and made Nephilim, and then he went to hell with Lucifer to pal around until the devil got jealous of his beauty and decided to make him ugly,” I said.
The whites of her eyes showed as she stared at me in utter shock. Her face was strained, fair skin snugged tightly over prominent cheekbones.
I met Remi’s gaze on the other side of her. Neither of us knew what the hell to do. Grandaddy had explained to us what was going on, this whole End of Days/Verge of the Apocalypse thing, but we’d more or less been primed for that realization at some point in our lives from birth. But Mary Jane Kelly?
First she was faced with an actual angel standing right in front of her, who was not currently dressed for dancing; secondly, she had Jack the Ripper—demon, ghost, tulpa, whatever—on her trail. Which obviously meant we had someone else’s kidney in our freezer.
“Look,” I said, “there’s no simple explanation for this. If we give you back your gun so you’ll feel safer, are you willing to listen to us? Suspend your disbelief?”
A final gust of hailstones scattered across the mountain’s shoulder, then transformed to a lesser rain. She was dry from the waist down because of the rain pants, but her shirt was plastered against her bra. Remi and I were absolutely soaked to the skin. At least rain was less painful than ice.
Just as she opened her mouth to answer, the ruined angel walked out of the trees and paused before her. He shook his wings again, then folded them into something approaching order, if you call a broken umbrella with ripped fabric and spokes sticking out every which way ‘order.’ Then he spread his arms wide as he looked into her eyes. His voice was a clarion, pure and sweet. “Am I not beautiful?”
She stared back at him. Her face hosted a series of microexpressions running from utter disbelief through incredulity to a flicker of pure repulsion.
Shemyazaz looked into her eyes. His burned brilliant in their sockets. “I am not,” he said. “I am not beautiful. Because he saw to it I am not!”
A buffet of wind threw rain into my eyes. I reached out, gently grasped her elbow and
angled her away from Shemyazaz so all she’d see was me. I could feel her trembling.
I bent, scooped up her SIG Sauer. Remi grabbed the clip he’d tossed, lobbed it to me. I slid the magazine in, clicked it into place and handed the gun to her. I could think of nothing else that might mitigate the shock of Shemyazaz. It allowed her a little control even as I carefully eased her a little farther from the angel.
Lightning lit up the mountainside. Thunder cracked overhead. All of us jumped save for Shemyazaz.
“Will you come with us?” I asked, releasing her arm. “We have a friend in a motorhome not far from here. A woman. We can explain things better if we’re out of the storm. Besides, Remi needs to get his arm looked at. The cat caught him a good one.”
As I had hoped, invoking Remi’s wound diverted her immediate focus from Shemyazaz. She was a Park Ranger, trained to render first aid. As she looked at him, Remi displayed his arm with its torn sleeve. The fabric was so water-soaked that only the faintest trace of pink remained of bloodstains.
She looked at the gun in her hand, then back at the angel. “What is he?” she asked. Then, with a little more determination, she asked Shemyazaz directly. “What are you?”
“Fallen,” he said, and only that.
“We’ll explain,” I told her. “I promise. Will you come?”
Her expression was pensive as she nodded, a little unsettled. She wiped the gun as best she could with the stretched-out tail of her t-shirt, snugged it back into its holster at her spine, looked at the ground, found the bag of surrogate remains—we had not after all distracted her from that—and picked it up.
“What about him?” she asked, looking at the angel.
“He’s not invited.” I had no holster for the revolver, so I just hung onto it. Too much barrel to stuff down my jeans, front or back. I gestured for her to precede us, exchanging glances with Remi every bit as pensive as her own. Well, she’d met an angel. Maybe, eventually, she could handle the truth about demons, too. And she’d better. If she was on Jack the Ripper’s list, she needed to know that, too. Because now neither days nor nights were her own.
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