by Jenn Stark
There’d been an explosion of fire back there in the mouth of the corridor, several of them, it’d seemed to her ears, and this literal giant of a man had continued to fight as if he’d felt no pain at all. She’d heard of such people, of course, their nerves deadened to any sensation. Once, long ago and somewhere else, she’d prayed to become one of them.
It hadn’t worked for her, unfortunately, and she suspected it wasn’t working for this man either. Because there was no denying that legitimate pain rolled off him, an almost physical wall of agony that shimmered and rippled in a wide arc. It also surrounded Joe, who’d clearly set himself up as the man’s protector, a rat terrier guarding a Great Dane.
“EMTs are on their way!” someone shouted, and a cheer went up. The news seemed to have a galvanizing effect on the security guard too. He shuddered, then hunched over a little more before rolling to his knees.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, there, buddy,” Joe said, crouching down next to the man. Angela noticed he didn’t touch the injured guard, and she wondered if that was in response to the man’s pleas or an instinctual knowing to give the big guy his space. Probably both. Joe had managed to triage his entire team on the way out of the corridor with her, pronouncing two dead and the other three…
She frowned, glancing back. The other men of their company had been gravely injured. She’d seen them go down. But Joe had given them only the most cursory of glances as he and Angela had rushed by, promising to get them help. She recalled only one of her men had been conscious, his eyes wide, his face rapt with wonder. Probably going into shock, given what had just happened.
A current of unease flowed through the crowd as the security guard lurched to his feet, swaying a little. Nervous shouts of “Hey, man, take it easy” and “Help’s comin’, dude, you’re good” emerged from the gathered group, but these died out as the guard shook himself like a wild bull, his hands still pressed to his face.
Angela grimaced. So far, she’d likened this poor man to a dog, a bear, a mountain, and now a bull. He’d saved her life, and he had doubtless saved the lives of her men. She owed him more than turning him into a cartoon character.
Then he dropped his hands from his face, and she gasped.
She wasn’t alone. The crowd at the center of the dirt track was mostly men, but even they stepped back as the security guard turned to face them, his brilliant green eyes shining out of a face she belatedly remembered as being gorgeous enough to be a model’s…if giants ever modeled. He stretched his fingers wide, his hands now decidedly less red and damaged, and smiled. He seemed exhausted and relieved at once.
“Who hit the man I was chasing? With the truck?” he asked, and his low, resonant voice flowed over the group with the impact of a barnstorming preacher, causing everyone to stand straighter and be prouder simply for existing in his presence. Who is this guy?
“I did.” A wiry middle-aged man in a ball cap, T-shirt, and blue jeans stepped out of the crowd, his face somber and unapologetic. “Bastard had caught half the stadium section on fire, and you had the word SECURITY on your jacket.” He grinned, deepening the lines around his eyes and face. “Figured I’d put my money on you.”
Laughter rippled through the crowd. “I thank you for it,” the guard murmured. He lifted his hand slightly as if to wave to the man. Angela didn’t miss the way the truck driver rocked back a little on his heels, his eyes going wide for just a second before he recovered himself. She couldn’t focus on that for too long, however, because the big security guard had turned and started moving for the exit.
“Hold up, there. You need the EMTs to check you out,” Joe insisted.
“I don’t,” the guard said, slanting Joe a glance. “You do. She does.” He jerked a thumb at Angela, though she noticed he didn’t turn her way. Instead, he kept walking. He hadn’t looked directly at her at all, actually, not even when he’d dropped her to the stadium floor during the first wave of attacks. Suddenly, she wanted him to see her, to focus all his attention on her, and her need for that focus was so strong, it caught her up short. She took a wrong step and landed awkwardly on her injured ankle, which rolled in her boot despite her relatively sensible footwear. Pain at last cracked through the box where she’d stuffed it away, and she cried out.
The burly security guard turned at once and seemed to be right at her side, though she would have sworn he’d been several steps ahead of her. He reached for her in one quick, flowing movement and caught her before she fell. His face twisted in a paroxysm of pain as his fingers wrapped around her arm, but there was no denying the surge of energy, the almost hysterical joy that flowed through Angela, seeming to trace every nerve ending with a blast of cool radiance. The pain instantly left her ankle, and she straightened, pulling away from him.
She didn’t miss his expression of relief to let her go. Touching people genuinely seemed to hurt this man, yet he hadn’t hesitated a moment to come to her side. Once again, who was he? At this point, she expected him to sprout wings out of his back and fly away.
Even as she thought that, he swiveled away from her, turning back to Joe.
“I’m sorry about your other men,” he said, somehow managing to pitch his voice beneath the roar around them as they approached the opening to the stadium interior. Joe’s bushy brows went up as if he’d just now remembered his fallen comrades, and he reached up to clap the man on the shoulder, stopping himself just in time.
“We’ll send those medics up to them and get that taken care of,” Joe said gruffly. “You say you don’t need EMTs, then you don’t need ’em. But don’t go anywhere, okay? Because I need you, and that’s a fact. You got someone with the stadium you gotta check in with, a report to make?”
The security guard’s expression shifted again, a trail of emotions slipping across his face. Pain, resignation, horror, doubt—and finally, acceptance. He nodded to Joe as Angela watched him, spellbound.
“I’ll wait for you,” the big man said. He glanced to Angela but once again managed not to meet her eyes. “But you should know I’m not with the stadium. I’m not actually security here. I was just in the crowd.”
“You…” Joe blinked at him, apparently dumbstruck for a second. Then he recovered. “Right. You got a name?”
“Gregori Stearns.” Beyond the unusual way he pronounced his first name, with the emphasis on the second syllable making the words sound like Gregori instead of Gregory, there was something familiar about his last name too. Angela’s gaze flicked to one of the signs hanging around the inside wall of the stadium. Stearns Pharmaceuticals.
Right. Somehow, she didn’t think this guy was the heir of a pharmaceutical fortune.
“Joe, go get the team taken care of,” Angela directed as they stepped into the corridor. “I’m going to have to go through the motions of getting checked out by EMTs, though I’m fine. But there’s going to be police and media descending on this place in the next ten minutes, if they haven’t already shown up. They’ll be all over us once the scene is secure. Mr. Stearns, we’re staying at the Loews Hotel. If you would like, you could meet us there after the dust clears.”
“Wait, what?” Joe swiveled his gaze between Angela and Gregori. Then understanding clicked. “She’s right. Especially if you’re not security here, you’ll be detained and questioned if they can find you. Beat it.”
For the barest moment, Gregori met Angela’s gaze, his glance so penetrating, she fought not to take a step back. This was a man who could see deep into her very soul, if there’d been anything left for him to see. This was a man she didn’t want to know her secrets.
This was a man she yearned to touch her with every breath of her being, to take her into his arms and—
What?
Jerking her glance to the side, she glared at Joe’s profile as Gregori stepped away. When she glanced back, the big man had disappeared into the shadows.
What followed after that was a public relations coup like no other. After Angela was removed to a safe location and secured, s
he weathered a media storm at close to ground zero of what the press was already calling a domestic terrorist attack. There’d been a total of five fatalities, including two of her men and three other members of the stadium’s security detail who’d been guarding the VIP area, and countless injuries. None of the rally mascot dogs had been harmed, she was told. In fact, they’d defended their handler with completely unexpected fury when the attackers had gotten close. The footage of the grateful and hapless young man would be the lead segment on every morning show the next day, Angela was sure.
Everyone agreed that an unnamed man with a security jacket had been instrumental in stopping the attack, but no one knew where he’d gone, and they were waiting for the tape from the surveillance cameras to identify him. Interestingly enough, the several witnesses interviewed all had different ways of describing the man, which struck Angela as something important.
Still, it was another two hours before they were able to make a break for the hotel. There, to her dismay, she found yet more people who wanted to poke and prod at her.
“You need to stop asking me how I’m feeling,” Angela growled at one of the doctors, though the man was only trying to do his job. She knew she should be grateful. After the EMTs had fussed over her sufficiently, she’d absolutely, categorically refused medical treatment at the local hospital. Then she’d learned that a medical team was being dispatched with the approval of Governor Filmore to attend to her in her hotel room, no questions asked. The governor of course knowing full well why Angela would never step foot in a hospital, even if she’d caught herself on fire. She wouldn’t go anywhere she couldn’t leave immediately. She’d never be trapped again.
“You’ve endured a serious shock,” the physician pressed. “These medications—”
“Are unneeded. Thank you,” Angela said. “You can take them and give them to someone who’s in pain, or I can flush them down the toilet. Your call.”
The doctor sighed but didn’t push further, and he also didn’t ask any more questions. Whether or not the governor had shared with him the particulars of her past, Angela didn’t know, but the doctor had probably been given the broad strokes. That was usually all that was necessary.
Joe stepped into the room. “What’s their status?” she asked quickly as the doctor turned, referencing her security team. She’d heard nothing of their condition, and it’d already been too long for it to be good news.
But Joe surprised her. “All three recovering in the burn unit at Atlanta General, by some miracle ending up with only second-degree burns. The bullet wounds are through and through as well. They’re not going to feel great for a while, but they’ll be okay. Eric and Jim were dropped by gunfire, according to the coroner. Any burns were postmortem. They died instantly.”
“Small favors,” Angela muttered, her heart twisting. She’d already begun watching the coverage on the news, mostly featuring cell phone footage snapped right as the chaos broke out. Once the real fighting had begun, though, there seemed to be no good video to be found, which, in today’s day and age, was almost impossible to believe. “Anyone taking credit yet?”
“That would be no, which has got everyone up in arms as well. The Democrats want to blame white nationalists and the Republicans want to blame leftist crazies. The police aren’t ruling out operators acting for no terror-related purposes at all, just the act of nutters, but even they have to admit the attack was too focused, too well planned for it to be that random. From what little they’ve been able to recover from the scene, the guns were ceramic and 3-D plastic jobs. Those are notoriously flaky, but with enough of them in play, you’re going to hit somebody. They passed through the security checks like water through a sieve. So easily, in fact, that the running theory is that they were planted on-site over the course of several days. There’s just no way that many weapons got through stadium security this morning.”
“I’m inclined to agree with you,” Angela said. She’d been puzzling over that same issue, the kind of puzzle she used to get all the time when she’d been working in the Frost Center think tank and dealing with insurrections and strike team tactics. Ordinarily, she liked to pace and work out the questions aloud, but there’d been no time for that. “The only problem with that explanation is that I hadn’t made a decision to go to the rally until this morning. So, was the plan simply to attack any VIP, or could this group have seriously mobilized against me that quickly?” And why? That, she felt, was the most important question of all.
Joe blew out a long breath. “Unknown.”
“Ma’am.” One of her aides stepped into the room, and Angela turned, her entire body tensing with anticipation.
“He’s here?” she asked.
“Mr. Stearns entered through the main lobby and was met by our team, who offered him the suite. He took it.”
Angela’s brows lifted. “Really.” Beside her, Joe huffed his surprise as well. She’d expected that to be a fight.
The aide nodded, her own surprise evident. “Yes. He said he was available for the job you needed him for, but only on his terms. He just flat out said that to the staffer downstairs, where anyone could hear.”
Angela glanced to the television again, which silently played the few clips of video they were able to salvage from the scene. “I don’t think Mr. Stearns worries too much about what other people see and hear,” she murmured.
4
Gregori studied the luxurious suite in which he found himself, struggling not to reach out and strangle Michael to death, especially with his boss standing so close to him. He didn’t know if he could bring such harm to the archangel, who’d appeared as soon as he’d walked through the hotel room’s door, but the more he had to work with Michael one-on-one, the more he was willing to find out.
“How can you not know what’s going on here?” Gregori snapped instead. “You’re the archangel of God.”
“And these are God’s children,” Michael replied, unperturbed. He’d issued a variation of this statement three times already, and it still didn’t make any sense. “They have the right of free will and the power to shield me from their thoughts.”
“Fifty-dollar psychics can read people’s thoughts,” Gregori countered. He stopped short of saying that he could read them too. Mostly because it wasn’t exactly true. He could feel others’ emotions, yes, and he understood their pain as if it were his own, because it was his own. But riding the currents of that pain were generally thoughts and emotions and reactions that helped form the picture of whatever had befallen the unfortunate human to get them into such a state. It wasn’t exactly the same as reading thoughts, but it was damned close—and Gregori was a demon of no particular renown. Michael was arguably the highest-ranked angel of God’s army, and this wasn’t a skill he possessed?
The archangel eyed him dispassionately, not responding to the bait of Gregori’s very loud and disrespectful thoughts. A moment later, he continued. “Angela Stanton is a junior congresswoman who has very recently been asked to sit on a highly classified technology research and development committee. This committee is known in certain circles as being instrumental in pushing through legislation and even congressional approval for a series of dark ops and deep state initiatives. She has absolutely no military background, has worked exclusively as an analyst in the public sector and a think tank contributor in the private sector, and she is considered a political neophyte. She’s only halfway through her first term and already significantly behind in her fund-raising efforts for reelection.”
Gregori caught the archangel’s emphasis on this last bit, though it seemed a minor detail. “Why is that important?”
“It implies she has no interest in extending her term as congresswoman. That is, of course, her choice, but it’s not an easy thing in most cases to get elected, and for her to have reached her current pinnacle position at such a young age, you would think she would want to hold on to it. But she’s taking no steps that would indicate that.”
“So how’d she get ele
cted in the first place?”
The archangel smiled, his expression still eerily flat. “A very good question. One I expect you to ask, as her newest bodyguard.”
Gregori made a face. They were back to this again. “I’m telling you this is a dumb idea,” he grumbled. “Bodyguards are not automatically confidants, and she’s already trying to figure out what I am. If she’s smart enough to work in a think tank, it’s not going to take her all that long to puzzle out the truth, even if she doesn’t believe in demons.”
“On the contrary. I’m hoping quite sincerely she figures it out almost immediately. I have reason to suspect that the government research being conducted under the auspices of Angela Stanton’s committee involves the demon horde.”
Gregori curled his lip, but he didn’t say anything as the archangel continued. “In fact, I find today’s violent demonstration particularly interesting. Congresswoman Stanton was caught completely off guard by a team of assailants that did not kill her, who, in fact, only resorted to gunfire when her security team recognized the threat and started to move her to safety.”
Gregori winced. “You think if I hadn’t entered the fray, they wouldn’t have started shooting, and those people wouldn’t have died?”
“Not at all.” The archangel’s tone was dismissive, and the tightness in Gregori’s chest eased. “You’re not the instigator of that action. It was due entirely to her security detail not going along quietly. Their alarm and Stanton’s alarm were genuine. They were legitimately afraid. Which means a third party wanted to scare her into going along with them or was willing to take her forcibly. Who would want to do that, other than an organization whose own research efforts were being put in jeopardy by the course of Stanton’s work in Congress?”