Back then, he’d looked like any other poor preacher’s kid: cherub-faced, modestly dressed, and sporting a haircut that hadn’t been in style since the seventies. But for all he’d looked like a choirboy, Robbie had been trouble from the moment he was born. For as long as she could remember, he’d been surly, in and out of suspension, always giving her and her dad a hard time—which only made sense when you considered how everyone was constantly comparing him to his sister, the valedictorian.
That was a huge part of why she’d stayed away, actually. When she’d left for college, Lauryn had hoped her being out of the house would help Robbie shed the stigma of being the eternally underachieving sibling and grow up a bit, or at least stop being such a delinquent.
Unfortunately, this seemed to be wishful thinking. The kid she remembered had at least looked wholesome and clean-cut, even if he hadn’t acted the part. By contrast, the man on the porch looked like he’d just stepped out of a music video. Everything on his body—clothes, hat, shoes, watch—was name brand and out-of-the-box pristine. If it wasn’t for the fact that Robert’s baby face still looked exactly the same as it had when he was twelve, she wouldn’t have known him at all.
He seemed to be suffering the same problem. For a moment, he just stared at her like he wasn’t sure what he was seeing, and his face fell into a sour sneer. “Look who’s back,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. “What’s wrong, Lauryn? Fancy med school kick you out?”
“That’d be kind of hard to do since I graduated six months ago,” she replied, glaring back at him. “And it’s Dr. Jefferson now.”
Robbie rolled his eyes. “Whatever. Just tell Dad to move his car. I’m going out.”
“Going out where?” she demanded. “And where did you get the money for that Charger?”
“From my job at None of Your Damn Business, Inc.”
“Funny how you having a job is the least believable part of that,” Lauryn said, climbing up the stairs to the porch where she could glare at him on equal footing. “Where’d you get the money, Robbie?”
“Uh-uh, Queen L,” he said, using his new height to loom over her as he waggled his finger in her face. “You don’t get to boss me around anymore. You left, remember? Believe it or not, my life goes on even when you’re not here to tell me how to live it. Now get out of my way. I got business.”
“And that’s exactly why I’m not moving,” she growled, putting her hands on her hips. “Any business that gives a nineteen-year-old kid a car like that isn’t the kind of business you should be doing.”
“For your information, no one gave me a damned thing,” Robert snapped. “I bought that car with my money. You don’t gotta go to med school to make bank, you know. I make damn good cash as a rapper. I do private parties and gigs all over this city. I’m probably going to get signed soon, and then I’m out of this Dumpster fire for good, so you can shove the attitude.”
By the time he finished, Lauryn was rolling her eyes so hard it hurt. Forget the car. If Robbie had earned half what his jacket cost from freelance rap gigs, she’d eat it right off his back, puffy sleeves and all. Before she could tell him as much, though, her brother stepped around her, bumping their father, who’d just finished moving his car a half foot farther down the curb and onto the grass.
“Robbie!” Lauryn yelled, spinning around. “Get back here! I’m not done with—”
He got into his car before she finished, cutting her off with a slam of his door. A second later, the oversized engine gunned to life, brand-new tires squealing on the icy pavement as the car roared down the quiet street before disappearing around the corner.
“What was that?” Lauryn cried, turning on her father. “Are you just going to let him go?”
“What else can I do?” Maxwell said, shuffling into the house like an old, old man. “He’s nineteen.”
“So?” she said, running after him. “You still try to run my life, and I don’t even live with you anymore.”
“You’re different,” he said. “You still listen sometimes.”
“So will he if you just try harder,” Lauryn said. “But you have to do something. He’s acting like an idiot.”
“I’m doing all I can,” Maxwell argued as he walked into the small kitchen and opened the fridge, taking out casserole dishes—the same ones the ladies from his church had been refilling for him every week since Lauryn’s mother had died—and placing them on the table. “I take him to church. I pray for him daily.”
“He doesn’t need church or prayer,” Lauryn said, frustrated. “He needs an intervention. He needs Scared Straight! He needs you to be his dad and tell him he can’t do this crap!”
Maxwell slammed the dish in his hands down on the table, and Lauryn braced for the storm . . . that never came. Fast as it had flared, all the anger in her father’s face fell right back out of him, leaving him deflated.
“‘Judge not lest ye be judged,’” he quoted softly, shaking his head. “I’m proud of all you’ve accomplished, but you left, Lauryn. You don’t know what we’ve been fighting. I’ve done all I know how to do for Robert, but I can’t force him to live how I want. It’s like when you were living in sin with that policeman—”
“Detective,” she corrected. “Will was a detective, and he has nothing to do with this. This isn’t a matter of morality, Dad. Robert could be mixed up in something really bad.” Because Lord knew nineteen-year-old boys didn’t get brand-new cars from doing anything good.
“I know,” Maxwell said sadly. “Jesus knows, I know. But if I push, he’ll leave, and then there won’t be any godly influences in his life at all.” He shook his head. “It’s better this way. God will guide him back to the right path.”
That was the stupidest thing Lauryn had ever heard—and that was saying something, standing in this house. Her brother was out there driving recklessly to who knew where in the middle of the night, and their dad’s solution was to cross his fingers and trust in some mystical man in the sky to make things right. But then, “Trust in God” was Maxwell’s answer to everything. It was the same ridiculousness that had made Lauryn move out in the first place, despite the fact that living at home through med school would have been MUCH cheaper than splitting an apartment downtown with Naree. But even when money had been so tight she’d felt like she couldn’t breathe, Lauryn had always considered the extra rent a small price to pay to avoid the daily spike in her blood pressure that came from living in the same house as her father.
Speaking of which, the old headache was already starting to pound through her temples, and Lauryn decided it was time to end this. “I’m going to bed,” she announced, walking out of the kitchen. “It’s too late for this mess, and I’ve got to be back at the hospital in a few hours for my shift.”
She paused there, bracing for the inevitable lecture, but Maxwell just sighed. “Go on, then. Your room’s just like you left it.”
Shaking her head, Lauryn stomped up the rickety stairs to her childhood bedroom. She barely took the time to strip off her coat before falling face-first into her old princess bed and closing her eyes in an effort to will herself to sleep as fast as possible, before anything else could happen.
Surprisingly enough, it worked. Lauryn had always been a terrible sleeper, and her old bed was just as lumpy as she remembered, but somewhere in the tossing and turning and general anger with the world she must have drifted off, because she woke up with a start when a loud, low sound rumbled through the house. To her sleepy brain, it sounded a bit like a growling lion, but as she sat up, the rumbling resolved itself into the sound of a very powerful, and thus very loud, engine.
“Dammit, Robbie,” she moaned, peeking over the edge of her comforter at the dusty, sticker-covered alarm clock that was still on her nightstand to see it was 5 am. On a good day, that was when Lauryn tried to wake up at home for her six o’clock shift. After a night like last night, it was the last straw.
She shot out of bed, taking the old flower-covered comforter with h
er like a cloak as she stomped over to the window to give her delinquent brother a piece of her mind. But when she pulled back the lace curtain, the vehicle making the racket outside wasn’t Robbie’s car. It wasn’t a car at all. It was a motorcycle, and sitting on top of it, looking straight up at her window like he’d been sitting out there waiting for her to appear, was the man who’d saved her life in the alley.
Lauryn’s breath left her body in a rush. Seeing him again was a bit like seeing a ghost. Even after getting a clean screen on her drug test, Lauryn had half convinced herself that she’d imagined the tall, stoic man with the sword, because that was the only explanation that made sense. But now, somehow, there he was, just sitting on his bike under the streetlight across from her old house. He even waved at her, causing Lauryn to jump back and yank the curtains closed. A silly reaction in hindsight since he obviously knew she was there, but how and why, Lauryn had no idea. All she knew was that she didn’t like it. Sitting outside someone’s window before dawn was stalker behavior. That said, jumping to conclusions was a bad habit for a doctor, and he had saved her life. Either way, she definitely wasn’t getting back to sleep, so Lauryn threw on her shoes, grabbed her coat from where she’d tossed it on the floor, and crept downstairs to give her mysterious savior the benefit of the doubt.
He must have cut his motorcycle off after she vanished from the window, because by the time Lauryn made it downstairs, the predawn morning was unnervingly still. Even the normal sounds of the city seemed to be holding their breath as she unlocked her dad’s triple-chain/deadbolt setup and crept out onto the porch, wincing when the subzero cold struck her in the face. The shock was almost enough to send her right back inside, but she was in the pipe now, so Lauryn kept going, clutching her coat tight around her shivering body as she walked down the frozen porch steps and across the tiny yard to the chain-link fence, stopping at the gate to stare across the empty street at the stranger who’d saved her life.
At least this time she could get a better look at him. In the dark alley where she’d found Lenny, she’d only gotten a vague impression of a dark-skinned man with broad shoulders and a deep voice who carried himself like a soldier. It was still dark now, but between the orange streetlights, the snowy road, and the city’s glow reflected off the low clouds, Lauryn could see that the man wasn’t as old as she’d originally thought. His age was actually very hard to place, but though life—or maybe his ever-present look of absolute seriousness—had left a few trace lines on his face, his body was that of a young man in his prime. His clothes were just as oddly timeless, and clearly custom-made. There was just no other way his long winter coat could fit him so perfectly. Odd as all that was, though, what really caught Lauryn’s eye was the long, cloth-wrapped object strapped to the side of his bike. The one she knew was actually a large cross-hilted sword.
The whole situation was so bizarre and surreal, Lauryn didn’t realize she hadn’t actually said anything yet until the man stepped off his bike and dipped his head in greeting.
“Lauryn.”
The sound of her name spoken in that calm voice made her stiffen in alarm. “How do you know my name?”
The man arched a dark eyebrow, amused. “You were yelling it at Lenny.”
“Oh,” she said, biting her lip. “Right. Well, that still doesn’t explain what you’re doing here. How did you find me?”
“I followed the ambulance to the hospital,” he said, shrugging like ambulance stalking was no big deal. “After that, I followed your father’s car. I would have let you sleep longer, but our enemy is moving quickly, and I wanted to introduce myself before they struck again.”
By the time he finished, Lauryn was no longer sure giving him the benefit of the doubt was a good idea. “What do you mean, ‘enemy’?”
“This might be easier to explain if I told you my name,” the stranger said, walking across the street and holding out his hand. “I’m called Talon, and I work for a higher power.”
Lauryn shoved her own hands deeper into her pockets. “Is that a euphemism or a really bad company name?”
“It’s the truth,” he said, lowering his offered hand but still keeping it where Lauryn could see. “I came to Chicago following a sign. At the time, I didn’t understand why. Now, I’m sure I was sent here to find you.”
This was getting crazier by the second. “Hold up,” she said, cutting him off before he could push them any further down the rabbit hole. “Following a sign? What kind of sign?”
“A sign from above.”
Lauryn sighed. Of course. After all that Bible quoting, what else had she expected? “Look,” she said, reaching up to rub her suddenly aching head. “I swear I’m not trying to be as insulting as I know this is going to sound, but are you one of those religious crazy people?”
“I’ve been called such,” Talon said, not seeming insulted in the least. “But what others think of me doesn’t change the truth.”
She was certain she was going to regret this, but . . . “Which is?”
It was a simple question, but Talon frowned, clearly thinking hard about how best to answer her. “There’s something very bad going on in Chicago,” he said at last. “I’m not sure yet how you’re connected to it, but when I see a miracle, I can’t just dismiss it. Things like what happened in the alley last night don’t occur without reason, and I learned long ago to listen when God speaks.”
“What miracle? We got lucky, and I already had an ambulance on the way.”
“You and Lenny both survived when everyone else who touched that green stuff died,” Talon reminded her, his thin lips curving into a knowing smile. “Sounds like a miracle to me.”
Lauryn shrugged. “You say potato, I say biochemical good fortune. I had very limited exposure, and there’s lots of reasons why Lenny survived and the others didn’t, starting with the fact that he wasn’t a junkie. That’s a pretty big factor in his favor.”
“But that doesn’t explain why Lenny could hear your voice when he could hear nothing else,” Talon said. “He was lost, but when you called him, he answered. That’s a sign, Lauryn. Jesus said, ‘Unless you see signs and wonders, you will not believe.’ No one can deny you were shown both last night, but while you might still refuse to see, I can’t ignore the writing on the wall. My eyes were opened long ago, but even if they hadn’t been, I would’ve had to be truly blind not to see that something critical happened in that alley, and you were right in the middle of it. That’s enough to make me believe you have been chosen to play an important role in what’s to come.”
Again, Lauryn knew better, but she still couldn’t help herself. “Important role, huh? For what play?”
“I don’t know,” Talon confessed. “But it’s going to be big.”
“Riiiight,” she said, shaking her head. “Listen, I don’t believe in—”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said, staring her in the face. “You don’t have to believe in good to know that there is evil in this world. You’re a doctor who works with the poor. You see the evil men do to themselves and each other every day. But there is something even greater out there than the petty sins of mortal men, and its claws are digging into this city as we speak.” He lifted his head, scanning the cloudy sky. “You can feel it if you try. All you need to do is pay attention.”
Lauryn was already opening her mouth to say she felt nothing of the kind, but before she could get the words out, a wind picked up. It was nothing, just a breeze carrying a faint hint of rotten trash. But the timing was enough to make her pause, which Talon apparently took as his cue to continue.
“Just as you knew your brother was walking the wrong path when he left last night, I can feel the city tilting off its axis,” he said solemnly, his dark eyes boring into hers. “I came to stop it, and on my first night here, I was led to you.” He smiled. “I believe you have been chosen for a great task, Dr. Lauryn Jefferson. That makes it my duty to stay with you and guard you until that task is complete and his will has been done on earth as
it is in heaven.”
From anyone else, that would have sounded ridiculous, but Talon spoke the ridiculous words with such doubtless certainty that, for a crazy moment, Lauryn wanted to believe him. He just sounded so confident, so sure, so unlike how she felt most of the time. But tempting as it was to follow someone who so clearly felt no doubt, Lauryn was not crazy, and it was too early for this crap.
Just as she was about to go inside to call the cops to come place Talon under a psychiatric hold, however, it occurred to Lauryn that maybe she was looking at this situation the wrong way. Sure, the crazy dude with a sword from the alley showing up uninvited in front of her father’s house before dawn was alarming, but it also proved that he was real, which meant Lauryn now had a witness who could corroborate her story from last night! Plus, despite his raving about evil afoot in Chicago, there was still the chance this Talon might actually know something useful about whoever it was that’d hurt Lenny, which made him very important in Lauryn’s book. She might not believe in hell, but Lauryn liked to think that there was a special punishment waiting for people who hurt her patients. Even more important, though, was the fact that despite being weird as hell and armed with a sword, Talon didn’t set off any of Lauryn’s danger instincts, which years working in the ER had honed to a fine point.
For Lauryn, that was the deciding factor. She prided herself on being a rational woman of science, but anyone who worked the front lines with the public developed an almost supernatural sense for when someone was a threat, and Lauryn’s was telling her that Talon wasn’t. Crazy, maybe. Delusional, definitely. But dangerous? No—at least, not to her. She couldn’t explain what made her so certain, but her gut was positive that Talon was one of the good guys.
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