“Did you know they exist?”
“What, guardians? Sure. Never met one, though.”
“I always thought Lionel was pulling my leg.”
He looked over at me, a little bemused. “When has Lionel ever lied about something like that?”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
The address Sebastian had given me led us to the Tropical Beach Motel, which had a buzzing neon Vacancy! sign and a diseased-looking palm tree wrapped in blue Christmas lights.
“This is it?” Shane said. The parking lot boasted a suspiciously green swimming pool cordoned off by a chain-link fence. “I’m not sure I trust anyone who uses this place as an office.”
“This is the address.” I got out of the car. Next door was a gaudy souvenir shop with a giant inflatable shark hanging over the door. “I guess I could call Jackson, and he could call Sebastian...” The chances were looking better that we’d be staying the night, but I hadn’t brought a change of clothes. My box of things from Jackson had arrived that morning, but I hadn’t thought to pack an overnight bag. I looked around desperately. “Wait.”
“What?” Shane followed my gaze. I was staring across the street to the ocean side at a squat building made to look like it was constructed from palm fronds. Brightly colored beach towels hung from the thatched eaves like flags. “The restaurant? What about it?”
“Look at the sign.” I pointed at a piece of painted driftwood fixed to the roof. It featured a sea-green feathered wing and bright blue letters that read Sand Angel Grill.
Chapter Seventeen
The line stretched to the parking lot. It was well past lunchtime and the weather was threatening, but apparently the Sand Angel’s sandwiches were worth the risk of getting wet. We queued up with everyone else and studied the cheerful chalk menu above the counter.
“Is there some secret menu item we’re supposed to order?” Shane sent. “Tuna melt with a side of fried feathers?”
“Ha-ha.”
“Grilled angelfish?”
“You think you’re pretty funny, don’t you?”
He chuckled in my head.
If the place was a supernatural speakeasy, it was doing a good job of staying undercover. There was no way a hut on the beach had a basement, and a quick scan of the people in line didn’t reveal anyone anticipating anything more than a sandwich. By the time we made it to the front, the only emotions I’d picked up were hunger and annoyance at the cold. The cashier—Max, according to his nametag—was a redheaded guy in his twenties, covered with freckles and in need of a haircut. He seemed totally normal until, before I could place an order—cheeseburger with bacon, extra pickles, fries and an iced tea—he passed me a loaded tray.
“Wha—?”
“Cheeseburger with bacon, extra pickles, fries and an iced tea. Right?”
I stared.
“Your double-stack’s coming up,” he said to Shane. “Here’s your Coke. Next!”
We were swept to the side by a tide of impatient sandwich-seekers. Shane’s double-stack appeared as advertised, and the cashier gave us a wink.
“Susannah’ll meet you here at midnight,” he said, and grinned. “Enjoy your burgers.”
* * *
We got a room at the Tropical Beach Motel.
Luckily, it wasn’t as horrible on the inside as it was on the outside, though they’d taken the tropical theme pretty seriously. Our room—which, thank God, had double beds—featured pineapple-print wallpaper, pineapple bedspreads and hideous brass pineapple lamps.
“He must be a pure telepath.” Shane was sprawled on one of the beds, flipping through basic cable on an old tube television.
“I didn’t feel him. Not even a ghost.” Pure telepaths were rare, but they were wickedly sensitive. Something about the singularity of their power made it possible for them to focus their gift needle-sharp.
“Me neither. I wonder what else he saw.”
“I guess we’ll find out.”
We passed the time with bad TV, and at a quarter to eleven, we jay-walked across the empty four-lane highway. The moon was new, and the Sand Angel Grill was dark, but plenty of light spilled out from the high-rise hotels down the beach.
“Are we sure he meant here?” Shane said. The counter was covered behind one of those corrugated steel security gates that protect sidewalk flower stands at night.
“Maybe we should knock.” I banged on the gate and winced when the noise was louder than I’d anticipated. “Or maybe we’re supposed to unlock it? Some kind of test?”
Shane shrugged and picked the lock, which gave easily, and we half raised the gate and ducked under. The kitchen area was dark, but there was a low light on in the back of the indoor dining room. We walked through the thatched archway leading from the counter and froze.
The guardian was sitting cross-legged on a six-top. She didn’t look up when we entered; she just said, quietly, “You’re early. Don’t you wait to be invited in?”
Like Sebastian, she had wings, but hers were white, tinged bluish-gray at the tips. She was wearing cutoff jean shorts and a white eyelet top with little ties at the cap sleeves. Her hair—a light blond—was pulled back in a high ponytail. She looked like she was twenty-five, but I knew, somehow, that she was older. Much older. She might’ve looked like a sorority girl on spring break, but a steady wave of brutal power came off of her like heat from an oven. It was a long moment before I could find my voice.
“Your cashier—” I began creakily, but she raised her head, and I went silent. Her sea-green eyes locked on mine, and I couldn’t look away.
“You’re a rare one.” She flared her wings. One brushed the wall to her left and knocked off a photograph of a beach umbrella on white sand. Shane moved in front of me.
“Relax,” she told him. Neither one of us relaxed. I thought she might have sighed but I wasn’t going to chance scanning her thoughts, assuming I even could. She looked back down at the tabletop, which was covered with stacks of paper. “Sit down and tell me why you came all this way.” She gestured absently at the chairs around her.
Shane and I walked forward slowly and took seats in front of her. Up close, some of the papers looked like handwritten letters, others were everyday bills for things like satellite television and electricity. I scootched my chair back as far as I could without seeming rude.
“We’re from New Orleans,” I said, “and we heard from—from a friend—that, uh, you might be able to help us.”
“Help you with what, exactly?” Susannah started going through one of the stacks of papers, looking down at us only periodically. She chewed on the end of a red pen as she flipped page after page from one pile to another.
“We...have a rogue,” I said. “A converter. One who can pull. He’s been killing people.”
“Mmm. Not surprising.” She wrote something on one of the papers and slipped it into a separate stack at the far end of the table.
“And we hoped...I mean, we wanted to ask if...”
“Spit it out.”
“Well—we don’t have a guardian. I can—I can stop him, but we need somewhere to put him. You know. After.”
Susannah cocked her head at me. “Why not just kill him?”
I glanced at Shane. “I’d rather not.”
She sighed. “I don’t see why. It wouldn’t be the first time. Right?”
I went cold. Shane’s hand tightened on mine, and I managed not to react. “Still,” was all I could make myself say.
“Fine, fine.” She went back to flipping papers. “So you want me to take responsibility for this unscrupulous converter—a puller, no less—and house him in my prison around my people, all because your city doesn’t have a guardian of its own—a situation, I’m afraid, that has persisted for quite some time now and shows no signs of improving?”
“Uh...”
“Why exactly would I do this for two people I’ve never met?”
“You want...payment?” I guessed.
She laughed�
�a totally incongruous snorting sound. “Money? I’m not interested in money. But favors? From someone with your particular talents?” She leaned forward on the table, her nose inches from my face. Her wings flared out and cast us in shadow. I didn’t dare breathe. “That is something I am very interested in.”
“No way.” Shane stood up. “No way. We’ll find another way, Cass. You don’t even know this—this person.”
I put my hand on his arm, but he didn’t sit back down. “What kind of favor?”
She leaned back. “For something like this we’re talking favors. Plural. Say...three.”
“Cass, seriously, this isn’t the way...”
I shook my head at him, still looking at Susannah. “What kind of favors?”
“Nothing too serious. Nothing beyond your abilities.” She grinned, but it wasn’t reassuring.
“I have to know what you’ll ask of me, first.”
“How should I know? I’ll ask when I need you. Could be years.”
“I won’t kill anyone,” I said.
“Yes, yes, we’ve already established that.” She chewed on her pen. “How about not unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
“No murder,” I said.
“Deal. Anything else?”
My heart pounded. This felt far too close to making a deal with the devil. Susannah flared her wings in and out in time with my heightened breath.
“You can’t harm him. This converter. Just...keep him from hurting anyone else.”
Susannah crossed her ankles elegantly, disturbing the stack of electricity bills. “If he attacks my guards, I assure you I will harm him. But otherwise, I see no difficulty.”
“All right.” I stood up nervously. “We have a deal.” I held out my hand.
“You’ll have to get him here. My territory doesn’t extend to New Orleans.”
“Okay.”
She took my hand and shook it. It was hot, like Sebastian’s had been, like plunging my hand into scalding bathwater. Susannah grinned her unsettling grin again. “One more thing.”
Before I had a chance to scream, she jerked me out of my chair and grabbed the back of my neck. Her body was close enough to mine that the unnatural heat of it made sweat break out over my skin. It was like standing in front of a bonfire. Shane tried to get between us, but Susannah held him off with one hand.
“You aren’t in control of yourself yet,” she said, almost in a whisper, her mouth by my ear. “I can tell.” My skin tingled under her grip. “You need to let it go.”
“Let—let what go?” I couldn’t quite keep the panic out of my voice. I still wasn’t sure she was completely sane.
“You know. So does he.” She nodded once at Shane, and then released me.
I stood completely still, trying to catch my breath.
“Oh, and here.” She flipped a card at me, and I barely managed to catch it in midair. It was a business card with Sand Angel Grill written on it in hot pink script. A phone number was scrawled on the back in red pen. “Two hours’ notice.”
Shane and I looked at each other.
“You can go.” She sat back down and waved us off as she wrote a check. We stumbled out the doorway backward.
* * *
Back at the motel, Shane made his feelings known. “What the hell were you thinking? You don’t even know that—that—creature!”
I leaned heavily against the doorframe. “Didn’t Lionel always say they’re supposed to uphold justice? It’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, justice for who?”
The rain had begun as we’d left the grill, and my clothes were soaked. I didn’t have another set, and the idea of sleeping naked was unattractive for many reasons, the least pressing of which was the probable cleanliness of the motel sheets. I went to the sink and started drying my hair with a hand towel.
“What else are we going to do?” I said. “We can’t kill him.”
I caught Shane’s subverbal response before he buried it. What if you do?
Susannah’s parting comment ran back through my head. Was this what she’d meant? That I was destined to be a killer no matter what I did, no matter how much control I achieved? Shane must’ve seen my face blanch. He opened his mouth as though he was going to speak, but closed it again and pulled the ugly pineapple bedspread off one of the beds.
“Here,” he said roughly, handing it to me. “I’ll dry out your clothes.” He tactfully went into the bathroom and shut the door, and I peeled off my soggy shirt and jeans and wrapped the bedspread around myself like an oversized robe. One of the Band-Aids on my back came loose, and I telekinetically replaced it.
Shane came out of the bathroom wearing only a towel cinched low around his hips, and there was suddenly nowhere for my eyes to go. I could see where the muscles of his hips cut in, where the dark hairs of his belly began. He laid our clothes out on the coverless bed and sat down, the slit of the towel gaping perilously over his muscled thigh.
Time for some self-preservation. I sat on the other side of the bed and angled away from him. I could already feel the heat coming off his hands as he ghosted them over our wet clothing, using his powers to heat them dry. We sat in silence until steam started rising from our shirts.
“Look,” Shane said finally, “I’ve been meaning to tell you...”
All sorts of worst-case scenarios flooded my head. He thought I was too dangerous and didn’t want to risk losing his powers. Lionel didn’t want me staying at the B&B and accidentally killing the guests in my sleep. Shane had found someone else and been too chicken to tell me. Before I could come to terms with any or all of the above, he dug around in the pocket of his still-damp khakis and pulled out a wet piece of paper. He unfolded it delicately, but it ripped in half anyway, and he handed me the two pieces.
The top half showed a professional-looking photograph of a woman. She was blonde and trim and seemed familiar. Confused, I scanned the text on the bottom half. It was an advertisement for an event at the Rolling River Church of Christ Activity Center in Metairie, some sort of inspirational speech. It took a moment for my brain to register that the speaker was Cindy Cepello.
“Tomorrow night,” Shane said. “I’ll go with you, if you want.”
“Why do you have this?” I was transfixed by the photograph of Cindy. She looked different. Like she’d lost weight. Maybe dyed her hair.
“I found it for those guests. Remember? But she’s not exactly hard to track down.”
I thought of her website. The stupid flapping wings and the harp music.
I should go. Tell her she was a fraud, that the angels she believed in were really crazy bar owners with wings and her miracle survival story had cost an innocent kid his life. The paper collapsed into a sodden wad, and I realized I was making fists out of my hands.
“I think it might be good.” Shane covered my clenched fist with his warm, broad palm. “You know, get it behind you. I think that’s what she meant.”
“Yeah,” I said, my heart pounding with some mixture of anger and anxiety. “That would be good.”
Our clothes were finally dry. I got dressed and curled up under the pineapple bedspread, but it was a long time before I fell asleep.
Chapter Eighteen
We got to the Rolling River Church of Christ Activity Center a few minutes late, mostly because I’d waited until the last minute to leave. Shane had been in his car, mentally calling for me, and I’d been finding a dozen little things that needed doing. Folding socks, making the bed, brushing my teeth. He’d finally come in and watched me, arms folded over his chest until I’d followed him down to the garage.
“I’ll wait for you,” he said as he pulled up to the entrance, leaning out of the driver’s side window. I nodded, grateful he wasn’t following me in. I was barely holding it together as it was. If he were there for me to lean on, I knew I’d break down.
As I slipped into the auditorium, a man onstage was introducing Ms. Cepello. The place was packed, and I instantly wanted my pills. A wave of a
nticipation surged up from the crowd, and my head started pounding with their overexcited thoughts. —angels, real angels!—so amazing—can’t wait—such a holy woman—will she sign my book?—I kneaded the base of my neck. It took me a solid five minutes of concentration to block them all out, and the pain in my head eased.
There was no way I was going to push past people to get one of the few remaining seats, so I stood in the back between a forty-something woman in a purple tracksuit and a group of teenage girls wearing matching Tchopitoulas Bible Camp T-shirts. They were whispering to each other during the man’s introduction. He was too far away from the microphone for me to hear him clearly, but I caught phrases like “amazing miracle” and “near-death experience.”
The man stepped back from the lectern and everyone in the audience clapped as Cindy came out from behind the green velvet curtains that backdropped the stage. Like her photograph promised, she was thinner than I remembered, and better dressed. Her blond hair was curled and pulled back from her face with a barrette, and she was wearing a sky-blue pantsuit and a small gold cross on a thin chain. I wondered if she’d gotten a stylist. She stood center stage for a few moments, waving around the room and smiling, then she shook hands with the man and settled herself behind the lectern.
She started out by talking about her depression—how she’d lost her job, gained weight, gotten into credit card debt. How she’d planned the jump, wanted to do it when there were people around. She talked about leaping over the edge, the instantaneous wave of regret, and how she’d felt God’s presence as the ground came up to meet her.
“I tell you,” she said, “I know some folks out there don’t believe in angels. But I felt the wings of an angel underneath me. I felt her lifting me up. And I knew then God had a plan for me. I knew I was meant to stay on this Earth, meant to spread his Word. He saved me even though I didn’t deserve saving.”
Everybody clapped, and Cindy smiled. I rolled my eyes.
“And that’s what he can do for each of you. Now, I’m not saying you should go and jump off a building—that’s a plumb bad idea.” Laughter. “And there’re plenty of folks tried that, and they haven’t been saved like I was. But I will say this. You gotta put your faith in the Lord. You gotta trust he’s gonna see you through. And he will. I’m telling you, he will.”
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