“Sorry,” Jake said, sitting back down. He turned to Mitch and held out the sword. “You wanna try again?”
“Not really, but I guess I—” His words abruptly cut off as he touched the hilt and a line of flame erupted around the blade. Mitch jerked his hand back, and the sword tumbled to the kitchen floor. The flames winked out as soon as he broke contact, but the blade clattered on the tile with a loud clang. “Oh, shit!” he exclaimed.
“Mommy? Gramma?” a small voice called from the back of the house. “Who’s out there?”
“Now you’ve done it.” Cassandra glared at Mitch as she stood. “She’ll never get back to sleep if there are new people to meet.” The older Harrison woman hustled to the hallway and disappeared, making reassuring noises as she went.
Jo looked at the men. “My daughter, Ginny. She’s ten.”
“Her dad?” Mitch asked.
“Your business?” Jo shot back. “Sorry,” she said, raising her hands to Mitch. “I’m sorry. He died four years ago. Stroke. I just get defensive, you know. Black woman, single mom, living with her mother, that whole thing. But we were the perfect suburban couple. Two incomes, minivan, the whole thing. Then Darren…got hurt at work and was on life support for two weeks. Even with insurance, the part we had to pay was back-breaking. So I moved in with Mama so I’d have some help with Gin.”
“I’m sorry,” Mitch said. “For asking, and for what happened. It’s none of my business. You don’t owe me anything.”
I certainly don’t owe you the truth, Jo thought. So if you’ll buy the stroke story, that’s the story you’ll get. Angel or not, Mitch didn’t need to know the real story of her husband’s death, and the demon that killed him. That was Council business, and her business.
Cassandra came back to the table, a small smile on her face. “I promised her you’d read to her tonight before bed if she stayed in her room and tried to go back to sleep.” She handed Jo a battered copy of Darwen Arkwright and the Peregrine Pact.
“She loves these books,” Jo said. She turned to Mitch. “So, do you believe us now?”
“Believe that there’s something about that sword? Yeah. Believe that I’m an archangel? Not by a long shot.” He held up a hand to Jo. “I know, you think this is some kind of proof. Well, maybe it is. But maybe there’s something else. But something is going on with this sword, and there was a demon in the high school last night, so if this thing helps us kill them, then I guess I’d better learn how to swing it.” He picked the sword up from the floor, and it burst into flames right on cue. Mitch held on to the blade this time, standing up and taking an experimental swing through the air.
His jaw was tight, and the crinkling around his eyes told of the strain he was under. After a minute, he set the blade carefully on the table. The flames winked out the second he let go. Cassandra reached out with a fingertip to push the blade aside, but there wasn’t even a hint of burn or scarring on the table’s surface.
“Good boy,” she said. “You’da been in for a world of hurt if you’d messed up my table. And I don’t care if you an angel or not, I’da whooped your butt good.”
Mitch chuckled. “I believe it.” He turned to Jo. “What’s next? For now, I’ll go along with something being all...messed up.” He nodded to Cassandra as he censored his language. She gave him a sly smile. “But I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Neither do I, but I know where to start looking. We need to go back to the school tonight and see what we can find. I’ll touch base with some of my sources today and meet you over there tonight around eleven.”
“Let’s meet at my gym instead,” Jake said. “That way we park and only take one car on our felony field trip.”
“Good idea,” Jo agreed. The three exchanged cell phone numbers, then Jo said, “We’ll meet you at your place at eleven and drive over to the school. We find out where the demons are coming from and what they’re after, and then maybe we can find some more clues to waking Michael up.”
“You make it sound like he’s taking a nap in my head,” Mitch said.
“That’s probably pretty close,” Jo said. “I have a couple ideas I want to run past some folks, then we can go demon-hunting.”
“You gonna bring that big hammer?” Jake asked. “Or do you have something better?”
“I like my hammer,” Jo said. “And it did alright last night, didn’t it?”
“Can’t argue with that,” Mitch said. “But why a hammer?”
“It’s a family tradition,” Cassandra said. “People in this family been swingin’ a nine-pound hammer at the bad things for a long, long time.”
“Well, let’s hope we don’t have to fight anything tomorrow night,” Jake said.
“Optimism,” Jo said with a smile. “I’d forgotten what that looked like. It’s kinda cute. Now get out of my kitchen. I’m going to go cuddle up with my little girl before I turn around and it’s her senior prom. I’ll see y’all tomorrow night.”
Jake and Mitch walked to the door. Mitch stopped, his hand on the knob, and turned back to Jo. “This is pretty weird, right? I mean, how crazy is this whole thing?”
Jo laughed, a bright, sincere, melodic thing that brightened the room. “Mitch, you think this is weird, remind me to tell you about my last trip to Georgia.”
6
Jo sat on the floor of her den, laptop on the coffee table in front of her with half a dozen browser tabs open, four leather-bound books arranged carefully in a leaning tower of research on the carpet to her left, and a giant sports bottle full of Mountain Dew sitting on the end table behind her to the right. Her mother sat in a rocking chair in the corner of the room, occasionally looking up from the scarf she was knitting to cluck at Jo and her “organization.”
Jo glared at the smiling unicorn head on the screen. Sparkles was resplendent with his rainbow mane and glittering diamond teeth, but he was ultimately useless. “I’m sorry, Jo,” the horse-headed tech genius said. “There’s nothing on the net anywhere that would explain Michael’s memory loss. Everything I can find that would destroy a celestial being’s memory would destroy the angel’s mind as well, and you said he’s not crazy.” If it was on the net, Sparkles would find it. Even before he got turned into pure energy and had his soul transferred into the internet, Dennis Bolton was an amazing programmer and hacker. Since becoming a latter-day Tron, there was nothing connected to the internet that he couldn’t access, hack, or take over.
“Well, I don’t think I actually said he wasn’t crazy, I just said his brain seemed to be in working order. Could it have anything to do with his fighting? Like maybe post-concussion syndrome or something?”
“I thought about that, but I checked in with Glory, and she says it’s pretty much impossible for an angel to get a concussion. Since they’re pure energy, when they manifest, it’s not like they have real bodies,” Sparkles replied.
“If you think that, you’ve never seen him without a shirt on,” Jo muttered under her breath.
“What’s that? Oh, you’re a giant horndog? That’s what I thought you said,” Bolton teased.
Jo heard her mother chuckle in the corner and shook her head. “I’m sitting in the floor of my den in sweatpants with my hair up talking to an imaginary man who chooses to present as a unicorn instead of going out and actually meeting a human being. Yeah, I’m the tail-chaser.”
Cassandra chuckled from her chair, and Jo turned to her. “You stay out of it, Mother,” Jo said. Her face grew serious as she turned back to the screen. “So there’s nothing?”
“There’s not a whole lot of information out there on angels hiding their light under the proverbial bushel,” Bolton replied. “Pretty much everything I’ve found has a lot more to do with Michael swinging that giant flaming toothpick of his around than it does with his mental state. I think you might be dealing with the first recorded case of angelic amnesia in history.”
“Yay,” Jo replied, leaning back against the couch. “So what next?”
; “Are you asking me?” Sparkles asked.
“Well, yeah.”
“Oh,” he said. “I was kinda hoping you were talking to your mother again. Because I have absolutely no idea.”
“What about Harker?” Jo asked.
“He knows less about angels than you do,” Bolton said. “His studies have all been on the other end of the celestial spectrum, as it were. So, no help coming from that quarter. Are there any friends of your dad that could help?”
Jo turned to her mother. “Ma, do you know anything about that?”
“Hmmm?” Cassandra looked up from her knitting.
“Oh, don’t even try to play me, old woman,” Jo said, her voice warm. “I know you’ve heard every word we’ve said for the past thirty minutes.”
“Well, I reckon that’s true enough,” the older woman agreed.
“So, did Daddy have any friends that might be useful?” Jo asked.
“I don’t think so, honey. Most everybody he worked with on the Council was either Luke, Harker, or more interested in shooting monsters than learning about the good creatures out there. There was one man, though...what was his name?” She thought for a moment, then held up a finger as it came to her. “That’s it! Robert Blinn. He teaches religion and philosophy at Gateway.”
“The community college?” Jo asked.
“That’s the one. He said he liked teaching at a smaller school. But he was a sharp one. Did a lot of research into angels. He always said if you’re going to understand demons, you needed to know where they came from.”
“That makes sense,” Jo said. “Dennis, you got a number—”
“Way ahead of you, sunshine,” the disembodied unicorn head replied. “I sent it to your phone already. According to his class schedule, he’s got office hours tomorrow from ten to noon, and he’s in class today until like six p.m.”
“Do I want to know how you got that little tidbit?” Jo asked.
“I hacked the college’s computer system,” Bolton said.
“So, no, I don’t want to know,” Jo said, shaking her head. “You are so going to get me thrown in jail.”
“Nah, it’s fine. I left just enough footprints in their system to make them think the Russians did it.”
“Great,” Jo said. “When I get sent to Gitmo, just make sure Luke can get a night flight into Cuba to save me.”
“Oh relax,” Dennis said, tossing his mane. “It was on his public Facebook page. I didn’t even have to pretend to be a student to friend him.”
Jo’s reply was on the tip of her tongue when her cell rang. She picked up the phone and looked at the screen, but didn’t recognize the number. She swiped her finger across the screen and held the phone to her ear. “Hello?”
“Jo?” The voice on the other end was soft, tentative, like the speaker was afraid they’d dialed a wrong number, or maybe afraid they hadn’t.
“This is she,” Jo replied. “Can I help you?” She kept her tone light, but motioned to Sparkles then pointed to the phone. The horse head nodded, then vanished, a map of Phoenix popping up on the screen with a large circle blinking around the city. As the call went on and Dennis was able to trace the call through more towers, the circle grew smaller and smaller until finally it was a blinking dot immunizing the caller’s location.
“I’m sorry, it’s nothing. Never mind...” Jo had a brief moment of recognition. That voice...
“Marla?” Jo asked.
“Yeah,” the woman’s voice was quiet, as though she was afraid of being overheard. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have called you. But I found your number from when we went out to breakfast the other night, and...”
“Do you need someplace safe to be?” Jo asked.
Cassandra’s head snapped up, and she mouthed, “Is that her?”
Jo nodded. Cassandra nodded back, and that settled that. Now Jo just needed to talk the frightened woman into coming to her house.
After long seconds, Marla said, “Yes.” Her voice was heavy with resignation and regret, like it took serious effort to agree.
“Do you have a car? Or can you get here if I text you the address?”
“No,” the other woman said. “Our car’s broke down, and if I take an Uber or something...” Her words trailed off.
“It’ll be too easy to track it,” Jo supplied.
LET ME HANDLE THAT. The words appeared on Jo’s computer screen. NOBODY TRACES ME UNLESS I LET THEM.
Jo smiled. “I’ve got a guy that can send someone. Nobody will be able to follow. I promise.”
“I don’t know,” Marla said. “Brian’s pretty good about finding stuff out.”
“Not as good as my guy is at hiding stuff. Trust me. Now where are you? I’ll have a car there in fifteen minutes.”
It was nearly an hour later when Jo heard a car door slam in her driveway. She was up like a shot, moving toward the front door and pulling it open before Marla even had a chance to knock. The blonde woman had a giant bruise on her cheek and a haunted look in her eye. She ducked inside, looking around like she expected pursuit any second, then stopped a few feet into the small but neat living room.
“Um...thanks,” she began, then stopped awkwardly.
“Don’t mention it,” Jo said, reaching out to take the duffel from the woman’s hand. “This all you brought?”
“I don’t have much.”
I bet you don’t. Bet that jerk doesn’t let you have much, no matter how much money you bring in. “Well, we don’t have a guest room, but the couch is comfy, there’s plenty of food, and—”
“And you can stay as long as you like,” Cassandra said, coming around the corner from the kitchen carrying a plate piled high with sandwiches. “But it’s almost lunchtime.” To Joanna, “Why don’t you set the table while our guest washes her hands? It’s the second door on the right, honey.” Cassandra waved her hand down the hall, and Marla nodded at her.
After she was gone, her mother turned to Jo. “That one needs your help.”
“That’s what I’m doing, Mama.”
“I know, baby. But be careful. A man that lays hands on a woman is worse than a dog.”
“That’s alright, Mama. I know how to take care of a rabid dog.” Jo’s voice was cold, the set of her jaw as hard as the hammer she frequently carried. The women bustled in the kitchen and dining nook, setting out three plates for a light lunch of sandwiches and fruit.
Marla came back from the bathroom and clapped her hands together. “What can I do to help? I might be a freeloader, but I can at least set a table.” Her eyes were bright and her shoulders back, once more exuding some of the confidence Jo saw in the cage a few nights before.
The table was set in short order, and the women tucked into their meal. They ate in a companionable silence for a few minutes before Cassandra looked at Marla and spoke. “So Marla, what do you do besides fight? Jo tells me you’re pretty good, but I don’t expect nobody much is making the rent beating people up in cages for nasty men like that Shelton.”
“You’re not wrong there,” Marla agreed. “But I don’t have another job right now. I worked in a hospital for a while, but they cut back on their maintenance staff and let me go.”
“What were you doing there?” Jo asked.
“General facilities stuff. You know, change lightbulbs, fix toilets, fix doorknobs, that kind of thing. I’ve been trying to get on with an apartment complex as a super or site manager job, because a lot of times those come with a place to stay, and then...” Her voice trailed off, and she looked down at her plate.
“Then you could get away from the son of a bitch who gave you that shiner?” Cassandra asked.
“Mother!” Jo exclaimed.
Marla just laughed. “It’s fine. She’s right. He is a son of a bitch. I would have left him months ago, but I didn’t have any place to go. We used to work together, and then we started seeing each other. Then, when I lost my job, he let me move in, and we got serious for a while, but he started getting real jealous, and then.
..”
“Then he started using you for a punching bag,” Cassandra finished for her.
“Pretty much,” Marla said.
“But you’re a fighter,” Jo said. “Why not fight back?”
“‘Cause he’s a fighter, too, and he’s been fighting longer than me, and he’s bigger—”
“And stronger, and faster.” Jo nodded. “It doesn’t matter how tough Ronda Rousey is, she ain’t never taking down Brock Lesnar.”
“Yeah. He’s no Brock, but I ain’t no Ronda, neither. So I’m broke, unemployed, and beat up,” Marla said.
“But now you’re here, sweetheart,” Cassandra said, reaching out to pat the other woman’s hand. “And that asshole won’t find you here. And if he does, he’ll have to deal with me.”
“Mother, language,” Jo said, but her tone was mild. She looked at the steel in her mother’s jaw and knew she’d defend this new charge against all threats if need be. Jo nodded slightly, planning to go out that evening and do a little defending of her very own. Pre-emptive defending, if you will.
7
“You know this isn’t really what the Council does, don’t you?” The cultured British voice coming across her car’s Bluetooth speaker was mild, but there was a hint of disapproval apparent. Or maybe he was just British. Jo could never tell if the condescension was real or a by-product of the accent.
“I know, Jack, but if our job is to protect innocents, this certainly falls under that umbrella.” Jo backed her car out into the street and turned the headlights on, piercing the darkness between the pools of streetlight.
“Our mandate is to protect innocents from demons and supernatural beings, love. Not jealous boyfriends with heavy fists and substance abuse issues.”
“Not all demons are summoned,” Jo said. “And not every hell has lakes of fire.”
“I know that all too well,” the voice of Jack Watson, great-grandson of the legendary doctor and detective sidekick, replied. “But what exactly are you planning, Joanna?”
Calling All Angels (The Shadow Council Case Files Book 1) Page 4