Angel Born

by Brian Fuller

  He found the Super Sleeper Econo Lodge precisely where the GPS said he would and shook his head. Tela Mirren, up and coming star, relegated to this? It was one of those hotels with fifteen units, all one story, in a gravel parking lot. It looked like someone had chopped double-wides into thirds and spaced them out. The office, little more than a crappy blue house, sat off to one side with a vacancy sign lit up in the window. The place had to be used for prostitution and dodging the law, and Helo was half surprised none of the units had any Vexus swirling around them.

  He parked next to a new silver Honda Odyssey in front of unit 9, the number slightly askew on the light-blue siding. While not the Lincoln Navigator Tela deserved, the van at least looked clean, if a bit out of place in a trash hole like the Super Sleeper Econo Lodge.

  After grabbing his phone off the console, he checked his look in the mirror. During the drive, he had morphed into the stereotypical movie-worthy bodyguard. Buzzed hair. Beefed physique. Com piece in his ear. He didn’t have a dark suit to change into to complete the look, so he wore his black fatigues.

  The sun had nearly set on the weathered hotel, though a bank of dark, swelling clouds had brought evening on a bit sooner than the sun wanted. He stepped out of the car and walked toward the unit, but before he got halfway, the hotel door opened and Tela ran out wearing a pink bathrobe, face fit to burst with some emotion. Her chestnut-colored hair was damp around her shoulders, her attractive face halfway through makeup.

  She flung her arms around his neck like he was a sailor returning home from war and hugged him long enough to make it feel awkward. The Ash Angel he was to replace, a Gabriel Blank by the looks of it, regarded them with a half smile.

  Nonplussed, Helo patted her back. Had she had another scare? Corinth hadn’t reported anything unusual when they had talked that morning. She pulled away and took his face in her hands.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, tears brimming in her green eyes.

  “I’m fine, Tela,” he reassured. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, letting go of his face and wiping her eyes. “It’s just, well, I don’t want to freak you out or anything, but I have had the most awful dreams about you ever since that night in the graveyard. They’re horrible. Just horrible. Wow.” She wiped her eyes again. “I probably seem really silly right now.”

  “Not at all,” Helo said. When an attuned cryptic had bad dreams about you, it wasn’t a good sign. “Why don’t we head inside and you can tell me about them?”

  “Maybe after the concert, okay?” she said, exhaling roughly. “Sorry again, Helo. I was so excited to see you, and here I am going all cray cray on you. Come in. This is Alan Smith. He’s the day guy. Alan, this is Helo.”

  Alan regarded him quizzically, and Helo knew why. Normals weren’t supposed to know their Ash Angel names. Helo had used the name Helo with Tela before it had become his official Ash Angel name.

  Alan, who had the official bodyguard-issue dark suit and tie, shook his hand. “Nice to meet you, Helo,” he said. “We were all bummed to hear you had transferred to another division.”

  Helo nodded. They might be bummed, but they would understand if they knew how Archus Ramis felt about him.

  “You want to take my car and I’ll drive the van?” Helo asked.

  “I’ll be staying with you on this one,” he said. “The big guy thought it would be best.”

  Helo nodded. Made sense considering recent events.

  Tela shut the door and turned toward them, arms folded. “Am I really in that much danger? Have you heard anything?”

  Helo wasn’t quite sure what the Ash Angels had been telling her about her situation, and he turned to Alan to see if he would jump in.

  “Nothing new,” Alan said, putting his hands on his hips. “We need more time to analyze the evidence from the latest abduction attempt. All we know is someone wants to get a hold of you in a bad way.”

  She exhaled. “Great. Well, I hope they figure it out soon.” She went into the modest bathroom whose once-white fixtures had all yellowed.

  “I don’t get it,” she said, picking up a mascara brush. “I’ve never done anything to anyone. It’s been a weird week. Is it true you were at the safe house, Helo?”

  “I was,” Helo said, scanning the room for a place to sit. There was one queen-sized bed and an old wooden table and chair so dented and dinged they looked like they’d been used as piñatas. Tela’s guitar case leaned against the wall next to the table. As he sat on the bed, the springs whined and popped. How old and well-traveled were these mattresses anyway?

  “Yeah,” Tela said, craning her neck so she could see him. “It makes that noise whenever you move half an inch. Danny says the bed springs need replacing. I think I’m going to pull the mattress off and put it on the floor tonight.”

  Helo turned to Alan and mouthed “Danny?” and he mouthed “Corinth” back. Helo had forgotten to ask Corinth what name he had been using with Tela.

  “How is Danny?” Helo asked. “I haven’t seen him in a while.”

  She leaned toward the mirror, applying eyeliner. “You know, I think he was getting bored with the whole bodyguard thing, but a couple of weeks ago, I got this new manager, Angie, and the two of them really hit it off. She’s over here all the time. The two of them just talk and talk and talk.”

  “She must be cute, then,” Helo said. Angie was probably the one who Corinth wanted him to meet. “He’s a sucker for pretty women.”

  Tela laughed. “That’s Danny, for sure. She is cute. She has this dark hair that’s to die for. A lot of fun, too. I’m going to close the door. Time for the noise.”

  She shut the bathroom door, hinges squealing, and a hair dryer whined to life. Helo turned to Alan, something occurring to him.

  “If she’s coming to the Michaels Ball, what does she think it is?”

  Alan grinned. “Is this your first one?”

  “Yeah,” Helo said. Things had been so hectic after his training he hadn’t so much as heard about it, though from what he understood, not many outside the Michaels division went.

  “We bill it as a second-chance prom to the normals,” he explained. “You know, a prom where grown-ups can go to relive the good times or maybe make up for some bad ones. The theme of this one is ‘Prom through the Ages,’ so there should be some nice costumes going on.”

  Sounded interesting but still a waste of time. The coordinates they had sent were to Aurora High School, which was apparently free on a Wednesday evening in the spring. Helo remembered going to prom with Alicia Parkinson his senior year. She was cute, but she also threw up half a pizza on her dress and his shoes halfway through the dance. And then left. Maybe when things calmed down, he would go to the ball. He could use a second chance.

  Tela stayed in the bathroom for another twenty minutes, and when she emerged, she was performance ready and wore a ruby-red dress, which she asked Helo to help zip up the rest of the way. When she turned around, she grabbed his hands.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked. “I know it sounds a little weird, but sometimes when I have nightmares about people, bad things happen to them, and I’ve been having nightmares about you for months.”

  A chill ran down Helo’s spine. “I’ve had some tough spots, but I’m good. And we’re not talking about this right now, remember? So, what songs are you playing tonight?”

  She let go of his hands and retrieved her guitar. “Well, I really don’t do dance music, and I don’t have the band with me, anyway. I’m going to sing at intermissions to give the DJ a potty break or something.” She pulled the instrument out of its case. It was red, like her dress. “I think I’m going to play acoustic versions of ‘Never Low,’ ‘Signal Road,’ and ‘Berry Hill.’”

  “‘Never Low’ is the best,” Helo said. It was the last song on the album she had released in the fall. “I listened to it like ten times driving up. Definitely my new favorite song of yours.”

  Her eyes started to water
again.

  “What?” he asked. She really seemed fragile.

  She breathed out, widening her eyes to keep the tears from escaping the confines of her eyelids. After a moment, she sat in the chair, which cracked and popped like an old man’s knees.

  “Why am I such a mess today?” she said to herself, seeming to get a handle on her emotions. “It’s just, well, I wrote it for you. It came to me in this beautiful dream where this gorgeous blonde angel walked through a wheat field. You were walking in front of her with your head down and upset and all. At the end, you turned and looked at her. You glowed like you’d just seen a lost friend. I woke up with the words in my head. I wrote everything down. These are the words I would have sung to you if all those horrible dreams I had about you would have really happened.”

  Helo was honored and awestruck. Alan, who was leaning on the wall by the door, raised his eyebrows and started texting like crazy on his phone. Tela smiled, cheeks flushing, and Helo smiled back. She had written a song for him—a hopeful song delivered by an angel. Maybe he wasn’t doomed after all. It felt good.

  “You want to hear it?” she asked. “Or was ten times enough for today?”

  “Eleven is good,” he said. “And when you play it at the dance, it will make an even dozen.”

  Her face beamed, and she strummed the first chords. Her rich voice poured into the room like sunshine. Helo closed his eyes and took it in.

  Falling with my wings on fire

  Falling like someone

  Clipped a wire

  Used to soar so high, you know,

  Above the clouds

  Never low. Never low.

  Where’s my mountain?

  Where’s my high hill?

  Where’s my courage?

  Where’s my will?

  Now trailing smoke I fall,

  Ground coming for me

  To end it all.

  Where’s my mountain?

  Where’s my high hill?

  Where’s my courage?

  Where’s my will?

  One last fire inside,

  One last hope to try,

  One last wind to ride,

  One last chance to fly.

  I open my long-closed eyes

  And turn my gaze

  To the blue, blue sky,

  Wings once charred and undone

  Unfurled and ablaze

  In the rising sun.

  There’s my mountain.

  There’s my high hill.

  There’s my courage.

  There’s my will.

  Never low now, Never low now,

  Never low now, Never low,

  Never low now, Never low now,

  Never low now, Never low.

  Awesome. Maybe it was her gift as an Attuned, or maybe the song was that good, but the words, even if just for a minute, lifted him out of the turmoil he’d been through since returning to the Ash Angel Organization.

  He opened his eyes. “That’s a winner, Tela,” he said. “Grammy time.”

  She blushed and looked away. “I wish! I guess we’d better get going. Just so you know, Helo, after every performance, I go find something really fatty and sugary and bad for me to eat, so get ready.”

  Helo chuckled. “Just like Dol . . . your dad.”

  Her mouth dropped. “You knew my dad?” she asked, eyes bright.

  Whoops.

  “Heard of him when we, um, took over your protection,” he backtracked. “Heard he liked everything with bacon, grease, and sugar.”

  “That’s him,” she said. “He was such a hypocrite, though. Made me eat lettuce and whole grain everything while he ate every quadruple-bypass burger he could find. He never gained a pound, though. Hope I got those genes.”

  She packed up her guitar, and they left together. Helo retrieved his Big Blessed Shotgun from the trunk of the Civic and hopped in the middle seat, Tela riding passenger side in the front. The back seats were folded down, a bunch of audio equipment stacked up on top. If he got to hear her sing more, then the dance wouldn’t be a complete waste of time.

  “So how long are you taking over for Danny?” she asked.

  “Just tonight,” he said. “Gotta get back in the morning.”

  “Really? That’s all?” she pouted.

  “Yeah, I’m afraid so.”

  “So what is it?” she said, sounding disappointed. “Are you, like, some kind of special-ops guy who only shows up when it really hits the fan? If I call up Guardian Protective Services, can I request you for a week or something?”

  “You can try it,” he said. “But yeah, I’m part of the team that gets called in when the big turds hit the fan. Danny called in this favor. Glad I could get free to do it.”

  Guardian Protective Services was an Ash Angels cover company operating as a personal protection service. On the face it sounded exciting but was apparently dull work—unless you were guarding an up-and-coming pop star Cain was obsessed with.

  Tela bit her lip and turned back to the front. The sun had fallen, the sea of lights and crowded streets breathing life into the city. Alan followed the GPS on his phone until they pulled into the parking lot outside the redbrick walls and green doors of Aurora High School. Clearly there were some Ash Angels who really got into the whole second-chance-prom thing, limos and rented sports cars intermingling with rather ordinary ones in a parking lot approaching half full.

  Alan parked the van in the drive near the front doors and popped the van’s back hatch, which opened ponderously.

  “What do you need out of the back?” Helo asked.

  “Just the amp and the instrument cable,” she said. “They should have everything else inside.”

  Helo got out and opened the door for her while Alan pulled a gun out of the center console and stuffed it in the back of his pants. After handing his shotgun to Alan, Helo hefted the big black amp out of the back of the van, and Tela grabbed her guitar and instrument cable.

  “Still working out, I see,” she said, squeezing his bicep.

  Helo had to think for a moment, but he remembered he had told her that he worked out when they were together in the graveyard after he had pulled off a feat most normals couldn’t do.

  “Yep.”

  Alan shut the hatch. “I’ll park it and come find you.”

  Helo walked toward the front doors, feeling more at ease as the number of friendly auras increased. And there were a lot of them. The dance hadn’t started yet, and the halls swelled with Ash Angels mixing and mingling. Even if he did know someone in the throng, Helo doubted he would recognize them. Some of the morphs were extreme, some outfits belonging in ancient-history museums. Tela’s grin stretched from ear to ear.

  “This is amazing!” she said. “I didn’t think so many people would be here! I should have brought some of my music to sell.”

  It took them a bit of asking before they were told the faculty lounge had been cleared for her use. Alan found them a short while later and stayed with Tela while Helo lugged the amp and the instrument cable to the gym.

  The decorations blew him away.

  “Prom through the Ages” hung on a banner to one side of the gym over the DJ station where Faramir, dressed as his Lord of the Rings namesake, fiddled with knobs and cables. Whoever had decorated the gym had divided sections into different periods of human history.

  There was a prehistoric section, an area for Egypt, one for the Wild West, a section decorated like the England of Charles Dickens, and yet another decorated for the future. All of it was uncannily perfect, the work of talented people who never had to sleep.

  Helo hauled the amp over to Faramir. “Where do you want this?”

  Faramir looked up. “Oh, hey, Helo. Is that Tela’s?”

  “Yep.”

  “Dump it over by that speaker,” he said. “I’ll get to it in a minute. Oh, and Aclima’s looking for you. She’s dressed like a Geisha. Gideon came as a Samurai, of course.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up,” Helo said
. He couldn’t avoid Aclima forever, but he hoped he could pull it off for one more evening.

  He wound his way through the colorful throng and back to the teachers’ lounge, Alan outside the door sitting on a plastic chair. Tela’s voice rose above the murmur of conversation as she sang scales.

  “How’s it look in there?” Alan asked.

  “Good,” Helo answered. “You ought to take a look before they get started. I’ll take over.”

  Alan thanked him and walked away down the hall. Helo felt out of place standing guard with a shotgun while surrounded by so many festive Ash Angels, and he wondered how many of them were aware of his parents’ deaths or of the attempt to kidnap part of this evening’s entertainment.

  At just after nine, clapping erupted out in the main lobby, and Helo had to stand on the chair to get a good look at what was going on. Grand Archus Gideon and Aclima paraded into the lobby. Both were all smiles, but it was hard to recognize either one of them, the Geisha makeup and Samurai armor as complete and professional as the rest of the decorations. Aclima caught his eye, and he hopped down.

  “All right, everyone,” Faramir’s voice boomed from inside the gym. “All you hall dwellers get in here. I’d like to thank all you angelic people for coming out to our second-chance prom in lovely Denver, Colorado. I’d like to remind everyone that tonight we have Tela Mirren with us. She is extraordinary, but also a very down-to-earth, normal person. So let’s keep it real tonight.”

  Helo smirked at Faramir’s veiled warning. Having a normal around meant everyone was going to have to put on pretenses, though, from what he understood, acting normal was part of the rules of the Michaels Ball. Still, no one had gone in either of the bathrooms yet, and that was definitely not normal. At his prom there was a line outside the women’s bathroom most of the night.

  The music started pumping, and a cheer went up. “Okay, it’s time to dance. First on the floor is our royalty tonight. You may recognize them, you may not, but give a warm welcome to Sensational Samurai and the Geisha Goddess!”

  Another roar rose and fell, the music swelled, and the dance got underway in earnest. Helo settled in, shotgun against his chest. All in all it looked like it would be about as tedious as he thought it would be, though some part of him wanted to head inside and see what was going on.