Angel With an Attitude

by Carly Bishop

  “I know, Iso. I understand.”

  She swept her hair back and took a deep breath. He understood too well and it tired her to know that his understanding her made no difference.

  “What did you mean earlier when you said St. John is tearing his hair out trying to figure my angle?”

  “It’s beyond his world view, Iso, to imagine anyone voluntarily throwing themselves into harm’s way to save a life. But now you have gone and begged to be allowed to take care of a child that a week ago you didn’t even know existed. He doesn’t even buy comfort and money as a motive.”

  “Have I been transparent with my feelings about Ian Candless?”

  “Not so much. You are naturally skeptical. St. John respects that, but he nevertheless believes you have some secret agenda for being here, Iso. And of course, he is right.”

  She got up from the floor and went to cup the baby’s head in her hand, to feel his soft curls. She needed no reminder of her agenda. She wanted this baby, a chance to nurture and care for him herself. But now her needs had grown beyond her original goal, and she couldn’t imagine a future without Angelo there to cradle Seth to his shoulder, coaxing him to sleep by the sounds and deep, soothing vibrations of his voice alone.

  She should never have come this close. The babe’s essence was so small and tender and warm, but the essence of the man, so large and powerful and arrogant—and hot—brought her to her knees.

  “Angelo.”

  She wanted to sink to the floor again, to let her head rest against his thigh and her hands in the stiff folds of his jeans. Her pulse thumped till she could hear her own heartbeat. She wanted him to be mortal, to comfort her, to take her to his breast as he had Seth, only to make love to her till Hell froze over and the triumph of good over evil was no longer at stake.

  But she knew she would have him only long after Hell had already frozen over, and she pretended it didn’t matter. “Stay with him a little longer? I just want to go…to the kitchen.”

  “Whatever you want, Iso, you can have right here.”

  “You mean you’ll conjure it?” She barely prevented herself from bursting into hysterical laughter. He would not conjure the only thing she truly wanted. “No. I can’t have what I want right here. You see, what I want is to brew a cup of tea for myself.”

  “Then go.” His voice was deeper, harsher than she had ever known. If he knew what was in her heart and her thoughts, then it had reason to be. She wanted more than anything to be away from him, where she could envision a life without him. “Seth and I will be fine,” lie said.

  And so will I, she thought fiercely. So will I, when you are gone and all that is left for me is Seth.

  Chapter Nine

  “She is whistling in the dark, mon ami,” Pascal said. “Past the graveyard of her dreams.”

  “What are you doing here?” Angelo asked, deeply annoyed, moderating his tone so as not to disturb Seth, who lay now fully stretched out over the length of his torso.

  Insouciant as hell, Pascal leaned against the frame of the French doors, watching Isobel cross the courtyard to the kitchen. “You have been too preoccupied to check in with me, so I put aside all matters pressing and not so pressing to come to you. The mountain to Mohammed, so to speak.”

  “Let me guess. As the French say?”

  “Oui Que sera, sera The mountain to Mohammed. It is my solemn duty to appropriate to the French whatever suits us, whenever it suits us.”

  “I would suggest a soupcon of integrity.”

  “Oh-ho!” Pascal chortled. “Your soul and your…persona, shall we say, are so far out of synch as to be virtual strangers, and you have the gall to speak of integrity to me?”

  Angelo sighed a very bored and angry mortal sigh. “What do you want, Pascal? What will satisfy you?”

  Pascal shrugged elaborately. “That you get your head on straight. That would make me—” He kissed his fingertips and let his fingers splay joyfully. “That would make me very happy.”

  “I am an Avenging Angel—”

  “Ah, yes. But your contentment just now, cuddling the baby, belies your belief, like some Saturday morning American cartoon character, that the fate of all mankind lies in your hands.”

  “Maybe it does,” Angelo snapped, the babe sleeping blissfully on his chest, “if you are representative of the rest.” He knew as he said it that if Pascal were truly representative of all the rest, the world’s ills would have long since passed away, but he felt as if he were being attacked. Defensive and churlish because of it.

  “Careful, Angelo,” Pascal warned. “I did not come to take your ill-tempered abuse. And if I must, I shall intervene to spare Isobel as well.”

  He ignored the threat. “I have not been illtempered with her—”

  “No. Only a sanctimonious ass. The result is the same, I fear. Soon you will be without friend or lover. Don’t worry. God will still love you.”

  Angelo glowered. “You go too far, Pascal.”

  “Au contraire. I have yet to begin,” he returned with deep feeling. “Have you thought perhaps that it is you who do not go far enough? Have you considered, even for a second, that there may be higher values to embrace than justice?”

  Angelo had forty scathingly brilliant comebacks, none of which, however, would have sufficed to silence Pascal. He was no saint. Angels rarely were. But Pascal had invented the sentiment himself.

  He sinned, he swore, he lusted, he bragged, he cheated and lied with impunity. Not once in the fiftyodd years that he had been among the Avenging Angels had he suffered the slightest consequence of flouting all the rules. In fact, he directed International, and it was Angelo who had lobbied hard to get Pascal into the position of leadership.

  There were others more fearsome, Angelo among them, but Pascal was wily, dedicated and heartful. His sinning was ever in the service of mankind, and he never, ever let a halo in his jurisdiction kid himself that justice was the be-all and end-all of a world gone mad.

  Love was the answer. There wasn’t any other way for the human race to stop killing itself off and come together. Pascal knew it, preached it when he got the chance—playing at whatever pulpit he found temporarily empty—and now he was in Angelo’s face with it.

  Angelo lowered his head, angling to touch his cheek to Seth’s warm curls, and for a moment he was so enamored of the baby, and of the smell of Isobel lingering on his sweet breath, that he nearly forgot Pascal was there.

  His anger had melted away, but it didn’t change anything. He didn’t know who he was if not an Avenging Angel of the Lord, dedicated, devoted to restoring justice. Let the choirs of angels and the cherubs and guardians—even Pascal—attack the hell that was earth by teaching only love. Angelo de Medici could not.

  “You do yourself a grave disservice, mon ami,” Pascal murmured. “In five hundred years you have become more fearsome than the Archangel Michael casting Lucifer from Heaven, but still you will not admit to your consciousness the miracle of sitting there holding the babe in his sleep.”

  Angelo flushed darkly. “That is a cheap shot, Pascal.”

  Pascal laughed. “I have been called many things, Angelo, but never the lobber of cheap shots.” He moved across the room, soaking up vibes like a sponge soaking nutrients from the sea. “I thought you should know you were right.”

  “About the informant?” Angelo queried. His one and only report to Pascal, in the form of a dispatch through the ether, had addressed this issue.

  “Oui. The man who was beaten and now accuses Candless Industries is a liar.”

  Angelo looked sharply to Pascal. The baby startled, lifted his head and gave a cry, then just as swiftly fell back to sleep. “Who put him up to it? The government?”

  “It would not be the first time,” Pascal agreed. “The strategy is simple. A phony charge—well publicized—encourages anyone with an ax to grind, and who was truly brought illegally across the border, to come forward.”

  Angelo nodded slowly. Easier by far for an
yone, he thought, to join in such accusations than to break the silence first. Among illegal immigrants, who knew they could be summarily deported in the blink of an eye, this was especially true.

  “Does this liar of an informant know anyone who was actually brought across by Candless Industries?”

  “If it is, in fact, occurring that Candless is importing illegals, then almost certainly he does. But it would be very foolish indeed to squeal on them. He would find himself very dead very quickly.”

  “It would be a stupid risk,” Angelo agreed. He had spent hours away from Isobel—when she was sleeping deeply and a fraction of his attention was enough to watch over her—searching among the illegals for those men and women bought and paid for with Candless money. There were too many, and they were all too closemouthed. One careless word…

  It wasn’t, as Isobel worried, that he had done nothing. He had even gone, during those hours when she rested, to the jail where the men who had murdered Gina were still being incarcerated.

  They spoke to no one. Their hearts and minds were branded with a fear of American authorities. They knew the tricks, the promises of immunity or even citizenship, the good-cop bad-cop routines. Where they came from, such tricks were staples elevated to an art form.

  An American prison was a hundred times better than being deported, tossed back into the poverty and corruption they had fled, and they knew it.

  “If all that is true,” Pascal said, having followed Angelo’s train of thought, “then it is certain the informant is a plant.”

  “Or a man who suspects he is already dead meat—”

  “At the hands of his compatriots,” Pascal finished. Among the men and women of the French Resistance, there had been no offense so heinous as betraying a brother in the cause. In much the same way, the illegal immigrants stood together, all for one, one for all. Especially those who had been brought across and given employment and housing from the start.

  But Pascal cared for none of this discussion. Angelo could see he was letting the subject wander where it might, but he was not yet finished with what he had earlier begun.

  Angelo rose from the easy chair where he had slouched to accommodate Seth’s small body. He turned the babe over, cradling Seth’s head in his hand, supporting his small, slumbering body against the length of his forearm. Taking the baby to his crib, he eased the child back onto his side, patted his diapered behind, and turned to face Pascal.

  “Why don’t you ask it?”

  Pascal’s brow hiked, his obnoxious what, me? expression taking over. “What question would that be, mon ami?”

  Angelo sighed in his mortal weariness at Pascal’s games. He materialized a serving of Portuguese wine for himself, knocking back half the goblet. “I have it within my power to elicit the information I want. What stops me?”

  “This is true. You need only present yourself to the illegals as one of them. They would believe you, and spill their guts to you.”

  “Or single out one of them and, by my willpower alone, maneuver the hapless victim into a corner where all hope of escape is gone. A place where, again, spilling the truth is the only option left.”

  “So then, Angelo, what does stop you, other than your preference to stay here, confined in this lovely marriage of convenience with Isobel?”

  SHE WANDERED across the courtyard to the kitchen patio. The path between them, lit by an occasional decorative lantern and fragrant with the scent of deep banks of flowers, wended its way across the lawn, this way and that. Not the most direct route, but more private and shorter than through the house.

  Hoping to soothe herself, Isobel breathed in the scents of the flowers and the spray of sea water crashing against the cliff side. A haze of fog covered the full moon. Dark clouds lined in silver by the moonlight hung stubbornly in place.

  There were times, Isobel remembered, when she had taken her angel consciousness into the thick of such clouds and back out again, to remind herself that she was a light unto the darkness, that it was within her powers to change the quality of a life, the essence of being, the dark, uneasy, even menacing thoughts of mortals by the light she brought to bear in their hearts and minds.

  Sometimes, in clouds as dark as these it was easier to see her powers metaphorically at work than in a human soul. Angelo was reacting to her now with equally complicated emotions, and she could not find her own light. She had traded it in for her human existence, and she had no power to pierce his reason.

  All she understood clearly was that he would rather honor the reputation of the woman she had ceased to be five hundred years ago than love her now. And Angelo de Medici always had what he’d rather.

  Let him, she thought fiercely, fully, humanly, womanly—thoroughly angry for the first time in this or any age. Let him rot in his honor, or let him flaunt it forever after. Isobel Avedon was through being the object of his restraint.

  She came to the kitchen door, punched in the security code she had been given and turned the brass doorknob. Ian and the family had gone off to some celebrity charity function for the night, but she knew Candless employees could and surely were instructed to follow her every move.

  Her specific codes pinpointed her location more accurately than if she had gone through the house, but even then, the motion detectors triggered hidden cameras. Angelo had pointed out the locations of a few of them.

  She didn’t bother looking for others. They were so cleverly concealed that unless you knew they were there, you simply didn’t see them. It was safer to assume that she was being watched at every moment.

  The only way to defeat the system was to provide motion and images for the cameras. Though she could not do this, Angelo could, and did. When she was supposedly alone in Seth’s nursery suite, Angelo provided moving holographic images of her napping or sewing or writing at the small antique rolltop in her own room.

  She found the cameras unfathomable and creepy and worse, invasive. Her image as an angel could not be captured, but she no longer had that advantage. She understood what it was for primitives to believe that their essence was caught and stolen by such contrivances.

  Her essence could not be stolen, or her thoughts invaded, so let them watch her brew her tea and take it outside to sit in the porch swing on the gazebo, looking out to the ocean.

  But when she had filled a ceramic teapot in the darkened kitchen and put it on the gas burner, then turned around to get a tea bag from the small brass canister, a ticking sound too near and too ominous drove away all thoughts of taking her cup of tea to the gazebo. The ticking alarmed her deeply, and she froze. When the noise ceased, she turned slowly.

  Harrison Candless sat at the glass-top kitchen table with a bottle of tequila and a revolver, alternately spinning the cylinder and pulling the trigger. He aimed at nothing, not himself, not her, just sideways while he watched the hammer slam home in the dark. But he was watching her.

  Her heart hammered in her throat. She wondered how the cameras had failed to pick him up. Why estate security had not come to take the gun away from him. Perhaps the cameras in the service areas of the house only monitored the entrances. He would know where he could sit drinking and contemplating his own death without leaving the house or risking interference.

  The digital clock read 11:30. “Harry?” she said. “Are you okay?”

  He snorted, spinning the chamber with his thumb, reaching with his left hand to pour himself another shot of tequila. “Okay? Relative, isn’ it?” He giggled softly. “Everything’s relative. Everyone’s relative. Can’t get away from ‘em.”

  “Your family, you mean?”

  “Uuuu-biquitous. Family. Yeah, tha’s what I mean all right.”

  “Harry, you really should put the gun down. Please. Just put it down.”

  “S’not loaded.” He shrugged. She could have sworn that tears glittered in his eyes. “See, there’s the bullet. Only brought one along—’f I miss once, I won’t be in any shape to use an—nother one.”

  “Harry—�
�

  “Harrison!” he barked. “My freaking name is Harrison Blain Galsworthy Candless.”

  “Harrison, then.” She believed what he’d said was true, that the gun wasn’t yet loaded, but he was teetering on some indefinable edge. And she could be wrong in believing him.

  She had to talk him out of this. She removed a tea bag and replaced the canister on the marble tile countertop. “Can I fix you a cup of tea?”

  “—’m not as drunk as I sound.”

  “You don’t have to be to want a cup of hot tea, or…do you want to just talk?”

  “Confess, you mean, Saint Isobel?” Again he breathed out through his nose in that disdainful snort. He spun the chamber over and over, then looked straight into her eyes. “Who are you? Where did you come from?”

  For a split second she thought he knew exactly who and what she was, or had been. What else had she done to be called Saint Isobel? “I’m just an ordinary woman, not a saint or even your confessor. But I am a good listener.”

  He shook his head. “Too much to tell, Ms. Avedon. Wouldn’t know where to start or where to stop.”

  He would talk, she thought, if only she could offer him a place to begin. The teapot began to whistle. She shut off the fire and strung the tea bag into the water to steep, then turned back. “How about Easter Sunday, 1977.”

  Still staring at her, he gulped, then his jaw jutted out. He was on the edge, sick at heart and a little too drunk on tequila and some private grief to think whether he should spill his pain or not. “Let’s see. Easter Sunday, 1977. Took my licks and kept on tickin’.” He laughed sourly at his bit of poetic license. “Easter Sunday. See, it fell on my birthday that year. I was seven years old.”

  Isobel thought about what a sweet age that could be, how loving seven-year-old boys were. But she didn’t think Harrison’s story was leading anywhere particularly sweet.

  His eyes closed tight for a minute. She thought he was fighting off tears. “What did you get for your birthday?”

  “The old man bought me a baseball bat. Had all these autographs on it.”