Angel Condemned

by Mary Stanton

  She flipped her cell phone open. No bars in the little window. “Murphy’s law, Sasha. Both batteries out,” and of course Sasha wasn’t there. He was at home, with Antonia, and she would be, too, very soon.

  She’d parked under a streetlight at the foot of an alley off Court Street. The streetlight was dimmed to a low, ugly orange. Her car was barely visible.

  And there was something—someone—slouched against the hood.

  Bree slowed down, and called warily, “Who’s there?”

  “Ms. Winston-Beaufort.”

  “Is that you, Caldecott?”

  He stepped forward into the insufficient glow. “A word, if you please, Ms. Winston-Beaufort.”

  “I’ve got more than a few words to exchange with you, Mr. Caldecott.” She opened the driver’s door and tossed her tote inside. She was very aware of the pine box in her suit-coat pocket.

  He smirked. “How was your meeting with Ms. Blackburn?”

  “Very informative.”

  “Stealing clients, Ms. Winston-Beaufort, is an ugly practice.”

  “But not illegal,” Bree said pleasantly.

  He hissed, like a snake. “So you admit to stealing my cases.”

  “I admit nothing of the kind.” She tapped his chest with her forefinger. He was spongy, like fungus. “Let’s be direct about this, Caldecott. Allard Chambers fired you, hired me, and isn’t interested in pursuing any action against the estate of Prosper White, which, I might add, is an estate no longer of interest to you, either, or it won’t be as soon as we get you dismissed at coexecutor. You win some, you lose some, Mr. Caldecott. My advice to you is to man up.”

  He bared his pointed teeth, and for a moment, Bree was tempted to step back. His breath was fetid, and the texture of his skin repellant. Instead, she stepped forward, forcing him against the front bumper. He slid away and stood in the half darkness of the alley. Only his eyes were visible, the poisonous yellow with black, vertical pupils increasing his resemblance to a snake.

  “Mr. Barlow is not happy.”

  “Too bad for Barlow.”

  Caldecott shot a nervous glance over his shoulder. Bree forced herself to stand, relaxed, one hip propped against her car.

  “Mr. Barlow was not happy with my partner, either.”

  A brief vision of Beazley’s gutted body flashed across her mind.

  “Mr. Barlow is willing to let bygones be bygones. He is”—Caldecott slid a little nearer—“a merciful one, in his way.” He held out his hand. “The Cross. Which does not belong to you. All he asks is the Cross.”

  “No dice.”

  Caldecott hunched over, as if he’d been kicked. “You will regret this, Ms. Winston-Beaufort.”

  “Perhaps, Mr. Caldecott.” She reopened the car door, then stopped, halfway in. “I know you’re not going to tell, me, but I have to ask. What kind of hold do you have over Stubblefield, anyway?”

  “The Cross!” Caldecott howled. “You must give me the Cross!” He seemed, suddenly, to shrink. Or the space in the alley behind him had grown. Bree’s breath caught in her chest, and she slid into the driver’s seat, locked the door, and fired the engine.

  She pulled away from the curb, and didn’t look back.

  She turned left onto Montgomery to make the short drive home, only half aware of the rising noise behind her.

  It was big. Vast. A low, rumbling noise that swallowed the sounds of her breathing and rose around her like a tide of water. It carried the dark. It was the dark. And it breathed with the slow, steady pulse of a muffled drum.

  The dark light cupped the car, crawled over the hood, washed against the windshield, covered the side doors.

  She braked.

  She couldn’t see where she was going.

  She stopped.

  The sudden silence was absolute.

  Wherever she was, she wasn’t on Montgomery.

  Something tapped at the driver’s window. Light taps. Polite, but inexorable.

  Let me in.

  Was that a hand pressed flat against the window?

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  Let me in.

  There was a shape behind the hand. So large that it blotted out what remained of the shattered moon. A smear of fiery orange red slashed across the head. The place where the eyes would be. The door rattled, as if battered by a huge wind. Bree grabbed the door handle and felt a force, immense, implacable, pulling from the other side.

  She held on, her palms slick with fear, and felt the handle slip. She braced her feet against the floorboards and held on, with a grip so strong the metal bent, twisted, and began to rip away.

  The door bulged out with a shriek of metal rending.

  A crash of silver light split the darkness outside, and for a moment, the door steadied in her hands. Behind her, around her, in front of her, three columns of familiar color danced, spun and coalesced:

  “I, Matriel.”

  “I, Rashiel.”

  “I, Dara.”

  Violet.

  Green.

  Blue.

  The car door wrenched open, and they spilled out onto a plain of fire.

  Petru and Ron stood at her right and left. Lavinia stood in front of her, blocking the terror that grappled with Gabriel. This wasn’t her universe. This was a place she had never been before. The strikes of silver reminded her of lightning, but of a kind never seen by mortals. And the terror . . .

  “The nephiliam,” Ron said.

  The terror had fire and worse at its command.

  “He is lost,” Petru said. “Our Gabriel.”

  “It will come for it,” Ron said.

  And to her, it seemed that this was an evil, terrible truth. The brilliant silver dimmed to metal gray. The tidal waves of burning burst mountain-high and began rolling toward them, swallowing the distance, eating it.

  Lavinia turned and faced her. “The key, child. Give me the key.”

  “No,” Ron said. “Not you. I’ll go.”

  “Perhaps it will take all of us. If so . . .” Petru said. He touched Bree’s shoulder, and laid his cheek briefly against hers.

  “It’s for me.” Lavinia held out her fragile arm, her hand out, palm up. “Come, child. There isn’t much time.”

  Bree fumbled the Cross from her pocket, her hands still slick with fear.

  “Not that.” The lightest of touches at her throat. “The key.”

  She slipped the scales of justice free and held them. It was all she had of Leah, and for a moment, she hesitated, unwilling to let go.

  The angels stood there, waiting.

  Bree dropped the charm into Lavinia’s hand. She brought it to her mouth and swallowed it.

  For a long, aching moment, nothing happened.

  Lavinia dissolved into a feather of brilliance like a peacock’s wing.

  Then, it shrieked. The fire roared into a hideous shape and thrashed against the heavens, half-man, half-demon, driven by a pair of sulphurous wings. It shrieked again. The sound was so high, so loud, so rage-filled that Bree clapped her hands over her ears in agony. The hate in the voice brought her to her knees. The stink of evil choked her.

  The fire collapsed into itself. For a long, terror-filled moment, there was silence so crushing Bree couldn’t breathe.

  A ferocious wind of dark rushed at them, rushed through the silver light, scattering the shards into uncounted pieces, rushed over them and barreled into nothing.

  Beneath her feet, a mighty gate clanged shut.

  It was the last thing she heard for a long, dark time.

  “Hey,” Antonia said. “You awake? Bree?”

  Bree swam out of sleep. She lay flat on her back, staring up at the bedroom ceiling.

  “It’s after ten,” Antonia said. “I started to get worried. You’ve never gotten up this late in your life. And you fell asleep in your clothes.”

  Bree sat up. She wore the clothes she had worn the day before. Her silk T-shirt. Her light wool trousers. Her suit coat lay crumpled on the floor. Her han
d flew to her neck. The scales of justice were gone.

  “Did you get mugged or something? Come on, Sister. Say something.”

  “What time is it?”

  “I just told you, it’s after ten.”

  “What day is it?”

  “What day is it? It’s Friday.” Antonia grabbed her hands and pulled her forward to the edge of the bed. “Now I’m starting to get seriously worried. I’m going to call Mamma.”

  “Don’t do that.” She stood up. “What time did I get home?”

  “I don’t know. I got home about one, and you were in bed already, if that’s any help. What—did you go out and get drunk with Hunter or something?”

  “No.” She shoved Antonia’s hand away. “Don’t tug at me.” She stumbled across the room and looked at herself in the bureau mirror. Her hair hung in tangles around her face. The flesh beneath her eyes looked bruised. The place beneath her heart felt hollow.

  “Did . . . Did you and Hunter break up, or something? Bree! You look so sad.”

  “I’ve got to get to the office.”

  “EB will be glad to hear that. She’s called twice, wanting to know where you were, but I didn’t want to wake you up.”

  “I mean the Angelus office.”

  “Shall I make you some cereal or something?”

  It was as if Antonia hadn’t heard her.

  “Where’s Sasha?”

  “In the living room. So, there isn’t any yogurt left because I ate most of it. All of it, actually, but I can run out and get you some.”

  “No. No.” Bree knelt and searched under her bed for her shoes. “I’ve got to get going.”

  “Not like that, Bree. You’re a mess.”

  She worked her feet into her shoes on the fly, grabbing her coat and her purse from the end of the bed where she must have put them when she got in last night, but she didn’t remember. She went into the living room, where Sasha lay by the fireplace. He raised his head at her approach. Bree went on her knees beside him.

  “Lavinia,” she whispered. “Is Lavinia all right?”

  He didn’t answer, but he followed her out the door, and across Bay, and down Mulberry to Angelus Street, and was with her when she unlocked the door to the little house with painfully slow fingers.

  The painted angel on the wall next to him held her hands cupped over her eyes. Crystal tears dropped between her fingers.

  She was halfway up the stairs and on the landing to the second story before Professor Cianquino’s voice called to her.

  “Bree. Come down.”

  She went to the head of the short flight to the first floor and looked down. Armand was in his wheelchair, a blanket folded over his shriveled legs.

  “She’s gone,” he said. “Come down and I will tell you how it happened. And why.”

  Armand pivoted the wheelchair with sudden, fluid grace and disappeared into the living room. Bree followed him with leaden steps.

  Twenty-seven

  “Lavinia became the key.” Armand had steered the wheelchair to Lavinia’s accustomed corner in the conference room. Ron sat at the table. Petru stood looking out the window at the graveyard beyond, his hands clasped behind his back. “Her light, her spirit, all of the energy that was Lavinia is now the key to the eighth gate. It was a sacrifice that the nephiliam couldn’t, wouldn’t make. Lavinia could, and did. She knew when she joined the Company that it could come to this. We all did.”

  “And the nephiliam?” Bree asked. She stood at the doorway, unwilling to come in.

  “Barlow,” Ron said. “That was the name of its presence here.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “Gone back to where it came from, I hope.” He and Petru looked at each other, and then glanced away. “Then again, maybe not.”

  “Wherever it is, the key is out of its grasp now,” Petru turned his attention back to the cemetery outside the window. “Of that, at least, Lavinia made certain.”

  “What about Lavinia?” Bree’s throat was tight. She bit her lip, hard. The tears came anyway.

  “Alive in memory,” Armand said. “She is part of the eternal now.”

  Petru spoke. “Come and see this.”

  Bree stepped into the room. Ron put his arm around her waist, and together they joined Petru and looked outside.

  Lavinia’s grave stood in the middle of the cemetery, a glory of spring in the middle of Savannah’s winter. A marble column as tall as Bree served as the base for a statue of an angel. The figure was so like her friend that Bree half expected it to move. The angel stood with its face upturned to the sky, wings folded closely about its slender form.

  A riot of flowers surrounded the base of the column. Creamy gardenias, white roses tipped with pink, and most evocative of all, a spread of lavender in full bloom.

  “They will always bloom, these flowers,” Armand said. “But they will need attention. It will help your grief, to be among the scents and colors of her garden. It is a reminder, too, that among the desolation of this place, where the bones of wicked men and women lie, there are forces that can prevail.”

  “I expected her to go,” Bree said. “But not this way. Not this soon. I didn’t get to say good-bye.”

  “We’ll miss her,” Ron tightened his arm around her. “We’ll miss her terribly. But she was fading; we knew that. She was wearing out her mortal body, and she was moving on.”

  “It is a chance not given to many, to defeat a nephiliam,” Petru said. “Gabriel himself was gravely depleted. If she had not come forward as she did, he would have been transformed forever, too. As it is, it will be some time before we see him again. And Lavinia? She had a sea of love in her.” He looked down, to keep them from seeing his tears.

  “An ocean,” Ron murmured. “I’ll tend the garden, Armand. We all will. We’ll sit in the sunshine and think of her. We’ll put up a bench.”

  Bree smiled at that, then drew the backs of her hands underneath her eyes, as if she could push the tears back. “Maybe we can have her tea out there. It’s an oasis in the middle of all that other dreadful stuff.”

  “Hope in the middle of despair,” Armand said. He rolled his wheelchair to the conference room door. “It’s done. I will leave you now. There is work to do. You still have a case to appeal, Bree. Schofield Martin and Jillian Chambers both require that grief and your work can coexist. Lavinia knows that better than anyone. “

  She started forward. “You’re not staying?”

  “I rarely leave Rosemont, as you know. It’s time for me to get back.”

  “But I thought . . . I hoped . . . That is, the Company is one less now.”

  “Is it?”

  Lavinia knows. Not “knew.” So she did live on, just not in the form that they could see? Bree took a breath to ask the question.

  Armand was gone.

  “I have collected some interesting data on the Indies Queen,” Petru said.

  Bree turned around. Petru and Ron were in their accustomed seats at the table. Ron had his iPad out. A stack of files sat in front of Petru. She walked to the window and stared at Lavinia’s tomb. The vivid colors of the flowers blazed in the dreariness of the cemetery. The lavender seemed brighter than before.

  “I’ve got the autopsy results,” Ron said. “The forensics team videotaped the crime scene, too. We should be able to get some good leads from that. As soon as you’re ready, Bree.”

  “Give me a minute, will you?”

  She didn’t wait for them to respond, but walked out of the room and on through the little house to the foot of the stairs. She looked up, half-hoping that she would hear the familiar soft clatter in the rooms above, the sounds that meant Lavinia was taking care of her small charges.

  There was no sound. But the scent of lavender was strong.

  Bree turned to the brightly painted cavalcade of angels on the wall. The last angel, the one with the silver hair, was smiling, and she cupped a sheaf of Madonna lilies in her hands.

  Bree touched the wall.

/>   The angel was warm to her fingertips.

  Bree sat at the head of the table some time later. She pulled a yellow pad out of her tote. “So we’re assuming that Schofield Martin’s death is linked to White’s?”

  Petru adjusted his glasses. “The evidence seems to be accruing quickly.”

  “Because these cases revolve around the Cross? We still have the Cross.” She took the pine box from her pocket and opened it. Such a small and insignificant thing to have caused so much trouble.

  “Leah did not have the opportunity given to Lavinia— the chance to return the key to the gate before she died,” Petru said. “That is perhaps why she placed the energy of the key into the talisman she left to you, Bree. To hide it. The cross drew the attention of all who knew what it was—like Barlow—and those who suspected what it was, like Chambers.”

  “Which one is this?” Bree asked. “The real one or the fraud? Leah had the real one, and she put the energy from the Cross into the charm she left to me. So the original Cross did what? Disappear? Fall apart? End up in another museum somewhere? Or is this the original after all?”

  “Jillian made a fake one, to get the funding back from the university,” Ron said. “Or did she?”

  “I do not know,” Petru said. “There is a fifty-fifty chance the Cross you hold is either. Where did the true artifact go after Leah made the talisman key? It was not much of a question for Barlow and his ilk. Whether the Cross dated from the 5th century or from this one, it was a cross in the form of this one that they were after. For them, the Cross is now moot. There is an expression which covers this, I believe. Leah pulled a fast one on Barlow. The key has been returned to the gate.”

  “Okay,” Bree said cautiously. “So we can forget about the nephiliam.”

  “For now,” Ron said. “You can never forget about a nephiliam.”

  “It killed Beazley. Caldecott said as much.”

  “We’re lucky it didn’t kill you,” Ron said bluntly.

  Bree’s eyelids felt sandy. Her head ached. She suddenly realized she needed a shower. “We need coffee. Tea. Something. Or at least I do.”

  “I’ll get it.” Ron bounced up and left the room.