To Light Us, To Guard Us (The Angel War Book 1)

by Sean M O'Connell

  “Oh no. No, I could never do that.”

  “Oh I know. I was only kidding. But tell me about him, where did you meet? How long have you known him? When is the wedding?”

  The ribbing only made the quiet doctor blush deeper.

  “He’s…. interesting, maybe someone that would shock you.”

  Serena nearly squealed with delight. This was going to be a very interesting evening.

  “Shock me how? Is he some sort of crazy ex-con?”

  “Actually, I’ve never served any time.”

  The familiar baritone startled Serena, partly because it contrasted so sharply with the feminine coo that the conversation had thus far consisted of, and partly because it came from further inside the lab complex. Her slight alarm turned to pleasant surprise as Julani emerged from the far hallway, his broad presence slightly out of place amidst the delicate syringes and fine-wired aviary cages.

  It almost looked like one of the animals had escaped.

  He wore an uncharacteristic grin on his granite face, corded hair bouncing softly against his neck as he strode easily up and leaned against a stainless steel counter.

  He looked younger, or rather, more his actual age, than Serena had ever seen him. As if being in the presence of women softened his frightening features.

  Maybe it’s just being away from the awful men he spends most days with.

  Serena decided the latter was more likely. Either way she was glad to see him look so relaxed for once. She voiced her pleasure in a characteristic effervescent rush.

  “Oh… my… goodness!” I don’t know how you tried to play so coy with me all day when we were talking about her!” Her statement was coupled with an exasperated extension of a slender arm in the direction of Dr. Peel. She then reeled in the same direction, turning on the veterinarian and puffing up in mock anger.

  “And you! How long have you been sitting on this little tidbit of juicy gossip, not telling me? Letting me waste away in that horribly over-air-conditioned office with nothing to do half of the day?”

  Haley just shook her head and laughed awkwardly, clearly uncomfortable that Julani had made his presence known, effectively spilling the beans.

  “Sorry Serena, I would have let you in on it, but this is sort of a spur of the moment thing.”

  Julani’s grin had fallen, perhaps because he sensed the doctor’s discomfort, but he offered his own input to divert attention from his date’s embarrassment.

  “Yeah Serena, I jus’ dropped by. Not like we had this planned for a while.”

  She stood between them, squinting back and forth between giant and doctor with mock aggression. After a moment, she cracked a smile

  “Relax you two, I think it’s great. And it gives me an idea. Since this isn’t a formal arrangement or anything, how about I treat you both for the night?”

  The bodyguard and the veterinarian both looked at her as if she were growing horns, probably because they could guess that each of them made a good bit more in annual salary than their mutual friend.

  ”Valdez gave me the green light to use the business account tonight,” she explained “which effectively means that money is no object for the next twelve hours or so. I was going to take Haley with me anyway. As long as you lovebirds don’t mind a third wheel, we can go nuts.”

  Dr. Peel, blushing further at the lovebird comment, twitched her chin from side to side in general disapproval of the idea.

  “No thank you. We can’t take advantage of Mr. Valdez’s generosity like that.”

  Julani, who had seen the account’s purchasing power in action, was less willing to dismiss the plan outright. His disadvantaged upbringing had taught him more about the value of money.

  “Hold up there, Haley” he pushed off the counter, knocking his scarred knuckles on the empty cage doors thoughtfully. “Generosity is probably the wrong word for what Hunter… Mr. Valdez had in mind when be made that offer. He ain’t exactly a generous person. And money ain’t real high on his list of concerns as it is. I say we do it.” Then he frowned in Serena’s direction. “But if you are gonna come along, you can’t keep making all them jokes.”

  She knew that he wasn’t really angry at the teasing, but she was smart enough to realize that she wouldn’t get away with much more of it. Julani didn’t like anyone laughing at his expense, and their conversation this afternoon had revealed to her just how intimidated he was by the beautiful doctor and their difference in station.

  Serena was happy to give the ribbing a rest, especially if it would make the giant feel like he had a better chance. She rather looked forward to seeing just how these two would get along. They were both so serious at work.

  “Whatever you say J. Us girls will even take you get some new suits or something.”

  “Ha! More suits is the last thing I want!”

  “Well, we’ll find something you like I’m sure.

  “Oh I know we will, and I’m gonna be eatin me some of them five-hundred dollar steaks, lobster, champagne, the whole nine!”

  “Sounds great to me. What about you, Doctor?”

  The vet raised her palms in a shrug of surrender and smiled her easy smile.

  “I’m not about to argue with this big, scary guy.” She gave Julani a wink and turned on her heel. Disappearing into the same hallway that he had emerged from a few minutes before, she called over her shoulder. “Let me just change out of these work clothes. J, you can take Ms. Dayne with you to give the elephants their vitamins.”

  The huge man watched the doctor go, appreciating the view a little more than he probably should have with another lady in the room.

  “She’s got you doing chores already?” Serena chirped, raising a well-groomed eyebrow in her large friend’s direction. He wagged his dreadlocks from side to side in amusement at her pluck.

  “No, it’s more her favor to me, I told you I love the damn elephants.”

  “Right J.”

  “I do”

  “I know.”

  “F’real though.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “…. I do”

  “I’m not arguing with you.” She wasn’t about to laugh at him out loud any more tonight, but Serena could hardly hide her amusement as she made the behemoth squirm yet again.

  Deciding he didn’t want to fight her funny little battles, Julani just snorted in irritation and walked toward the exit door. He paused for a moment to reach into one of the hundred or so drawers in the lab. His oversized hand came back gripping an equally oversized plastic bottle, filled with what looked like gigantic aspirins.

  Turning his shadowy face back toward her, he flashed the ghost of a grin.

  “Let’s go meet the family.”

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  Hunter Valdez was upset.

  Sitting alone in his office, he stared blankly at the screens of numbers on the far wall. The display was a nonsensical mess of numerals arranged in columns and rows. Digits on the far right of the screens ticked upward. Interminably upward.

  Each flash of the LED told the man that his empire was growing, expanding, devouring. Creating a fortune that each moment became vaster than it was the second before.

  The never-ending numerical good news did little to lift the man’s spirits.

  His angular face, so publicly perfect, twisted underneath dead eyes into an ugly grimace. The comfortable void of his business suite was witness to something the rest of the world would hardly believe.

  The unflappable Hunter Valdez was in the beginning stages of a temper tantrum.

  His normally flawless features twitched in saccades of irritation, gradually building into a pronounced tick. One hand clenched and unclenched nervously, the other tapped a rapid rhythm on the polished desktop. Grinding his teeth audibly, Valdez jumped out of his chair, toppling the heavy leather over behind him with a loud crack! He ripped off his silk tie and cast it into a dark corner with a curse that would make a Portuguese sailor blush.

  His day had
started well enough, but a private conversation with Brown had incited the downturn. Moods had roller-coastered through the boredom of the day until he sent Serena off on her shopping spree.

  The benevolent gesture gave him a satisfaction born of arrogance. No other boss would care so little about money as to let a young woman loose in one of the premier fashion capitals of the United States with what amounted to a blank check.

  He gloried in the fact that he was able to do such things without batting an eye. Money was no object. It was all about image now. But even cockiness couldn’t keep him from the attacks in his own head.

  He kicked off his custom-made Italian loafers. In this mood he had to rid himself of their confining heat. Manicured fingernails tore at the collar of his shirt, popping the top button to skitter across the cold silent floor. Storm clouds gathered in his mind, causing him to exhale sharply through flared nostrils with each breath. These relatively inexplicable fits were not terribly uncommon, and had plagued the slick man since he was a young child.

  The more Hunter tried to control them, the worse they got. It was best to just let it go. He knew he would invariably end up breaking some priceless artifacts, drinking a half bottle of Tullamore, and screaming tearfully into the night, embarrassed by his weakness, and alone.

  Always alone.

  The only living person who had seen him in such a state was Brown, and then only once.

  The shrinks he’d sought for explanation came back with diagnoses ranging from basic panic attacks, to manic depressive disorder, to PTSD. No medication had been effective, and those who even suggested repetitive therapy sessions had been silenced by either Valdez himself or his loyal bodyguard. One arrogant fool had been so insistent that Hunter had him stripped of his license and shipped off to work in some Romanian basement asylum on principle.

  He paced back and forth, mentally assaulting his employees; the unreliable madam that had let him down for the last time, himself, and the world, each in turn.

  As the turmoil inside of his consciousness crested, he dashed across the room and tore a painting from the wall. He dismantled the frame with his bare hands, smashing the protective glass screwed into the ornate wood.

  It was one of the few pieces he had actually picked out for himself, something he genuinely liked. A Frederic Remington. Original of course. One of the artist’s famous Nocturnes called White Otter Moon. Valdez had always appreciated the way that the artist captured the colors of night.

  Half of a man’s life was lived at night, and it had always seemed a shame to him that the time between sunset and morning was relegated to sleep. Most of the plebeians that occupied the world’s oxygen saw the night landscape as dark, achromatic. Their snores and sexual encounters played out in shades of gray.

  Dull minds behind dull eyes living out dull nights in dull hues.

  Valdez shared Remington’s view of the nocturnal esthetic, the artist’s trained eye and hand had worked together to create scenes of camping cowboys and midnight powwows in beautiful purples, blues, ambers, and maroons. The resulting masterpieces were so close to the reality of night -or rather, what night could be if one looked.

  Hunter Valdez saw the night this way. Even fancied himself and Remington to be birds of a feather.

  Part of the reason that he loved Las Vegas so much was that the city nights were neither forgotten nor forgettable.

  Here, in the heart of bleak desert, the darkness was always alive with blazing color, like a Remington exaggerated. Neon and florescence forced even the dead-brained public into seeing the night as a playground…

  White Otter Moon was counted among the prized possessions of one of the world’s richest men. It belonged in a museum. Sadly, its pricelessness meant nothing in the moment.

  Hunter Valdez -in his fit, his rage, his spasm of irrationality- cast broken shards of wood and glass onto the floor at his feet, inhaling the climate-controlled air sealed inside the frame through flaring nostrils. He spat out the staleness with a grunt.

  With a cry that -had another been there to hear it- might have sounded like an angry hyena mauling a spoiled child, he punched his hand through the taught canvas and clawed the oil painting to shreds. The colors, so fastidiously mixed two centuries ago, crumbled off of the loose threads like falling ash.

  Appetite for destruction satisfied, Valdez simply opened his hands and let the ruined piece of priceless Americana hit the floor.

  Silence descended upon the room, smothering the air like a wet blanket. The effect was dark, eerie after the commotion. He closed his eyes and inhaled.

  Exhaled.

  Inhaled again.

  Beads of sweat gathered on his forehead as he relaxed, calming himself.

  He had been here before.

  With the irrational craving for mayhem slaked, he should be able to sit, breathe, cool down. Hunter mentally slowed the freight train in his head, forcibly calming his respiration and concentrating on his heart rate. His own pulse thundered in his ears in systolic fury. The normally steady, strong beat was now drastically accelerated and irregular. Perhaps this day had been even more stressful than he was allowing himself to admit. His body had ways of telling him when enough was enough.

  Valdez strode across the opulent office to the side bar for another drink.

  Halfway there, a burning sensation began to crawl upward from the soles of his feet.

  The pain was not sharp, more like a spreading heat, worms of discomfort sliding up the back of his legs, and into his lumbar spine.

  Pinched nerve.

  Time to terminate the chiropractor.

  The intensity gradually increased as he stood frozen, puzzled at the alien sensation.

  His mind began to wander across the possibilities.

  Tingling heat spiked rapidly as it reached the base of his skull. Unpleasantly novel impulses spread as a web of pain spun beneath his skin.

  Suddenly his world was on fire.

  White dots danced across his vision and he gasped. Agony drove all air from his lungs and refused to let any more in. Hunter Valdez doubled over and brought his hands to his face palpating tenderly, checking to see if indeed he was engulfed in flames. He had seen stranger things in his childhood on the voodoo-enchanted streets of Manaus, Brasilia, and Rio. The crawling, torturous sensation penetrated his scalp, his skull, his brain. He clawed at his own hair, vainly trying to distract himself from the symphony of torture. His guts twisted and spasmed.

  All conscious thought escaped, riding out on ragged breath and rolling tears.

  Furniture toppled as he threw himself flat on the floor, rolling in the manner of a man trying to extinguish a fire.

  Screams choked silently at the back of his throat.

  He could only clench his teeth and hiss as the burn sought out every cell of every tissue and did its devilish work. Rolling to his stomach, Hunter Valdez pushed himself up, the simple coordination of muscles nearly impossible to achieve. Real or imagined; the stench of smoke tickled his nostrils. Maybe the fever coursing through him was enough to set him afire after all.

  Consciousness flashed in and out like a strobe light.

  Moments of clarity -terrifying in their realization that this crescendo of agony was only climbing- alternated with periods of pain so intense he was unable to do so much as blink. After what seemed an interminable stretch of enduring, dumbly hoping for relief, Valdez’s final lucid thoughts focused on one thing and one thing only.

  Make it Stop.

  With fanatic singularity of purpose, he stumbled through the glass doors separating the suite from its expansive balcony.

  Dry evening air sizzled against his skin.

  A pink and orange flair of setting sun assaulted his retinas, burning afterimages onto the darkness as he slammed his eyes shut and drove blindly for the railing.

  He fell. Stood. Fell again, and dragged his half naked form blindly across the marble walk of the balcony. The unguided slither took him diagonally across the diamond-shaped porch,
where he finally reached a waist-high guardrail. Gasping and drooling bloody mucus from his handsome mouth, Valdez heaved himself up and leaned heavily against the edge.

  Calves and hamstrings protested with a piercing spasm that nearly felled him again.

  Casting blurred vision all around, he searched frantically for relief. A beleaguered brain struggled to sort out the reeling images of precipice, floor, sky, blinding lights and the dark shadow on the tower.

  Valdez began to cry. Hot tears that traced blistering tracks down his flushed cheeks.

  Make it Stop!

  The single thought consumed all of his fading brain capacity. Every synapse flamed with seemingly unquenchable fire.

  Straightening as best he could and opening his eyes to get his bearing…Valdez found his relief.

  The fountain-pool that ran through the center of the balcony and off of the tower’s precipice in a decorative gesture of disdain for the needs of an aquatically-starved state. Pristine water bubbled silently up from the stone bed and rushed into empty desert sky through a bite in the balcony wall, where it would evaporate long before reaching the ground. Tonight, the beautiful colors reflecting off of the water, normally soothing, made Hunter Valdez cringe. Cool ripples promised relief from the consuming burn.

  He released his vise grip on the railing, moving back toward the center of the balcony, toward the oasis.

  Without support, his legs failed him again. He dropped down and sideways, landing heavily on his shoulder with a whump. Another agonized groan squeezed past his lips as he rose up onto burning palms, supporting himself on quaking arms. What remained of his brain told him he couldn’t possibly stand again. Instead, he clawed his way forward, scraping along the marble balcony.

  Make it stop.

  The pool’s edge and the relief it promised could only be a few feet away, but the distance seemed to stretch away as he inched painfully into the glow. The illusion was almost as agonizing as the peeling sensation created by his achingly slow progress.