Archangel Chronicles 7 - Shot In the Dark

by LaBarthe L. J.

  Baxter turned away from watching the two canoodling Archangels, his attention returning to a scene he would much rather watch. His own lover, Liam, a Necromancer, was stripped bare to the waist, his T-shirt tucked into the back of his low-slung faded jeans like an oversized bandana. Liam was bent over a car, peering into its engine bay, his brother, Declan, beside him. Baxter had absolutely no interest in cars, a fact that had made both Declan and Liam stare at him as if he’d announced himself to be the human incarnation of Jesus Christ or perhaps even Satan.

  “Dude,” Declan said pityingly, “a man who doesn’t get cars isn’t a man.”

  “Oh, he’s a man, all right,” Liam said, and Declan rolled his eyes, “but c’mon, Bax, this is a classic! It’s a 1975 Plymouth Roadrunner. This is a piece of American automobile history!”

  “It’s a car, a really old car, a car that’s over a hundred years old,”

  Baxter had said. “I don’t get the fascination, and right now, it’s a car that’s rusting to bits of scrap and doesn’t even run right. What are you going to do with a pile of rust and scrap?”

  “Restore it, duh,” Liam had said fondly.

  And that was exactly what he and Declan had done. Baxter had no idea what they were doing; all the ecstatic declarations over doors and seats and spark plugs—seriously, spark plugs, what the hell?—made about as much sense to him as reading Ancient Greek. But it made Liam happy, and so Baxter was happy.

  He had to admit that after several months of painstaking work, the car didn’t look too bad. It was a dark cherry color, the trim a rich black, and the chrome work gleamed. The leather seats were soft brown, worn and comfortable, and the interior and dashboard were polished to almost reflective brilliance. After a lot of mojo Baxter didn’t understand to protect the car from all kinds of negative influence—and not just demonic—Liam and Declan had gotten to work on restoring the engine.

  The interior and bodywork had been easy in comparison, Liam had said; the engine and all the parts were damn hard to find.

  Parked beside the Roadrunner was a truck, a souped-up truck Baxter knew was Declan’s pride and joy. After his brother, the truck held the place of highest esteem in Declan’s ordering of the universe, but again, Baxter couldn’t understand why. A truck was a truck, wasn’t it? A means of getting from point A to point B. But no, Declan coddled the truck as if he were a helicopter parent. It was, he had loftily told Baxter, a 1980 Chevy Blazer, a truck designed to be comfortable as well as hold a shit-ton of stuff. He’d modified it, made it a four-wheel drive, and covered it in charms and sigils and protections before filling it up with the equipment of the demon tracker. It was impressive, Baxter supposed, but really, the way these two went on about their damn cars was a bit over the top.

  Several feet away from them were Angelique and Lily. Unlike the men, they had their T-shirts on, for which Baxter was profoundly grateful—not that he had any problem with the female form, it just didn’t do as much for him as the male form, particularly Liam’s male form. The alpha and beta of his pack were working on Angelique’s bike, a vintage British motorcycle, a 1995 Triumph Daytona in black, so well cared for it looked as if Angelique had bought it only yesterday, straight off the lot, rather than building it herself from parts from the ground up. Baxter could see why she and Declan were so good together: their mutual appreciation for vintage automobiles was second only to their mutual appreciation of loud, frequent sex and the job of hunting down evil and destroying it.

  “So our loved ones are being rev heads, huh?” Danny sat down beside Baxter.

  Baxter laughed. “Seems like it. Does it make any sense to you?”

  “Nope.” Danny opened the bottle of beer in his hand. “Guns I know.

  Weapons and explosives, no problem. Horses, yep, horses are awesome.

  Cars and bikes and trucks? No clue.”

  Baxter raised his own beer in salute. “Amen, bro.”

  Danny laughed. “You know, until Jelly got that bike, I don’t think Lil gave two shits about them, either. But that bike…. I think it’s because it’s an English bike and reminds her a bit of home. A little piece of nostalgia.”

  Baxter looked over at the two women again. Lily’s short-cropped white-blonde hair was sticking up in spikes, and her forehead was beaded with sweat. There was a smudge of oil on one cheek and her hands were dirty. But the expression on her face was one of almost beatific happiness.

  “I think you’re right there,” Baxter said.

  “I grew up in a farming town,” Danny said. “Trucks were what we used to get our goods to the store or the market. We didn’t go on about ’em like Declan does over his beast. Though”—he sounded grudging as he continued—“Liam’s car is pretty damn sleek.”

  “Like a cougar or something,” Baxter agreed. “I don’t really think much of it beyond that. Now, surfboards, well….”

  Danny laughed. “Can take the boy out of Southern California but can’t take Southern California out of the boy.”

  “Damn right.” Baxter grinned. Then he sighed. “Do you miss your hometown, Danny?”

  Danny took a long swig of beer. He swallowed, then nodded slowly.

  “Yeah, sometimes. It wasn’t always great, you know? But it was home.

  The war reached South Dakota when I was twelve. It was Uriel and his legion who gathered us all up and took us to Oregon. I’ve never seen anyone as angry as he was that day. I’ll never forget it. But in Oregon, well. School taught us about the war, and I don’t think they meant to make us all wanna sign up when we hit the age where we could, but it did. I don’t think many of my class avoided joining the Marines.”

  “Same here.” Baxter shifted a little, stretching out his legs and leaning back in the deck chair. It creaked a little, but Baxter paid it no mind. It had held his weight for the last seven summers; one more wouldn’t break it. “I was seven when we had to move. Mom was so angry.

  It was Shateiel who came to our community—I grew up in one of those New Age hippy spiritualist commune places that sprung up in the late 2040s. Shateiel had to call Gabe.” He shook his head at the memory.

  “Gabe showed up, and fuck, he was pissed. I remember him marching in dressed in his armor. He looked like he’d been in a war zone. Shit, he had been in a war zone. He was filthy, covered in blood and mud and fuck knows what else, and his sword was just as dirty. I think it was that he’d so clearly appeared out of a battle that shut Mom up. Plus the fact he yelled at everyone that if they wanted to be cheeseburgers for demons, then fine, but he was making sure all the kids were taken to safety.”

  Danny whistled. “Uri didn’t have to threaten that. Everyone went from my town without a complaint.”

  “Your town probably wasn’t full of hippies stoned on pot, dude.”

  Baxter gave him a small smile. “Shay took us to the Oregon coast. The waves weren’t as great as Cali, but they were pretty good. And yeah, like you, I enlisted as soon as I turned eighteen. Then I came out as gay, fell in love, he got shot, and Mike recruited me.”

  Danny hummed. “You know, I just realized we never swapped recruitment stories. Isn’t that weird?”

  “Yeah, a bit. All the other packs have. Hell, we know about Liam and Dec’s recruitment.”

  Danny winced. “I wish we’d learned that in a situation that wasn’t us basically accusing them of being liabilities in the middle of a magical forest in France.”

  Baxter laughed. “What is it Rod says? ‘Shit happens, mate, she’ll be right.’”

  Danny chuckled. “I guess. Australians, hey?”

  “Their English is not like ours.” Baxter cast another glance at his lover. Liam had moved, giving Baxter an unimpeded view of his ass.

  “Mm, nice,” Baxter murmured.

  Danny followed Baxter’s gaze. “He has got a good butt, yeah.”

  “Hey, eyes off. You’ve got a mate. Leave mine alone.”

  “A guy can look,” Danny said.

  Baxter snorted. Then he laughed. “
Okay, okay, fine. Also, your wife is covered in oil.”

  Danny turned quickly to take in the sight of Lily, now with a few smudges on her cheeks and oil and grease all over her hands and arms.

  “What are they doing to that poor bike?”

  “No idea. I’m not a mechanic. So how did Mike recruit you?”

  Danny shrugged. “I got shot in the hip and was in a military hospital in Jamaica. He came and visited me. I knew I’d likely be routed out of the Marines because of the injury—it took out a chunk of bone, so I had a plate put in there, and I was looking at a long stretch at a desk. He told me who he was and then made me an offer. I wasn’t too sure at first, until he told me he knew I was a shifter, and that the Venatores were his elite force of shifters, answering only to him. I was a bit pissed, actually. I’d gone to a lot of trouble to hide the shift—a fuckton of very illegal and questionable drugs kept the wolf dormant. But he insisted that I wouldn’t need to do that, and the shifter would be celebrated as much as the man. I finally told him I’d have a look at his organization when I got discharged from hospital, more to shut him up than anything. And then I came here and met Lily and, well. The rest is history.”

  “Ah, a pretty girl lured you in, huh?” Baxter teased.

  “No, but she was definitely the icing on the cake. God, I remember that first moment like it was just yesterday. I was right on the edge of telling Michael to shove it when she walked out of the house. She was wearing this blue floral dress, battered combat boots, black leather wristbands with silver spikes on each wrist, and she was talking to Angelique. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen; she was tiny, barely reaching my armpit. She still is tiny, before you make a crack. And then she smiled at me as she walked past, and I saw part of her full back tattoo of the tree of life. She said hello to me, and I realized she was British, and, well, I told Michael to sign me up.”

  Baxter grinned at him. “And then you started dating Lily, huh?”

  “Not immediately. She was suspicious of me. Polite but aloof. I got to know Angelique and Riley first, and Angelique asked me to join her pack. Michael said that was excellent, he’d been on the verge of suggesting it, as he thought we’d all work well together, and he was right.

  You were around as well, as I recall. Just not doing so good.”

  Baxter winced. “War is hell.”

  “That it is, my friend; that it is.” Danny reached over to lightly clout Baxter’s knee in a comradely fashion. “So how about you?”

  Baxter looked over at Liam. For a moment, instead of cars and grass, he saw a muddy, rain-swept field littered with the dead and the dying, his lover among them, his eyes staring sightlessly at a sky the color of lead. It was silent, an eerie, oppressive silence, apart from the sound of his feet squelching in thick mud as he tried to get away from the carnage that was louder than a gunshot in his ears. He swallowed hard and shook himself, sending the memory back into the corner of his mind where he kept everything he recalled about his active duty securely locked up.

  “You ever hear about the Battle of Turquoise Ridge?”

  “Near Winnemucca, Nevada? Eastern flank of the Osgood Mountains?”

  “Yeah, there. It used to be a mine before the war.”

  Danny’s eyes grew wide. “Wait. You mean that Battle of Turquoise Ridge? The one that was like a slaughterhouse?”

  Baxter smiled, even as he felt the memories threaten to escape their box in his mind. “If there are other Battles of Turquoise Ridge, I don’t want to know, dude.”

  “Shit, man. I had no idea. I’m sorry. Listen, if you don’t want to—”

  “No, it’s cool. Well okay, not cool, but it’s better to talk about shit than keep it in, Raphael says.”

  “Well he’d know, I guess, being the medical Archangel.” But Danny frowned. “Still, you don’t have to tell me. I completely understand, you know?”

  Baxter felt immediately better. “Yeah, I know. But… okay. There were six of us who survived that hellhole. And Michael came with Raph and they pulled us out. We were… well, fucked. No other way to put it.

  Lily said they used to call it shell shock; Raph called it PTSD. I just called it hell and was happy to leave it at that. It took a long time to get past it enough to function, and I lived here most of the time. Mike and Raph seemed to think here would be better than a military hospital, and I guess they were right. Anyway, after about two years, Mike asked me if I wanted to join the Venatores. By then, I’d seen plenty to know exactly what I was getting into, and I was pretty good friends with Riley and Lily, and snark buddies with Angelique, so I said yeah. Angelique instantly claimed me for her pack, so here I am.”

  “Dude.” Danny rested a hand on his knee. “I knew you’d had PTSD. I knew you saw some shit in the war. I had no idea it was the Turquoise Ridge shit, though.”

  Baxter took a long drink of his beer. It had gone warm now, but it still tasted like salvation. He savored it as he swallowed, concentrating on the bitterness. “I’m better than I was.”

  “You fucking totally are and my admiration for you has, like, shot up ten thousand percent.”

  Baxter rolled his eyes. “Can we not make a drama out of this?”

  “Absolutely. Drama making over. Done. Zipped.”

  Baxter laughed in spite of himself. “Okay, good. I know this will go around the pack, because we have no secrets, but tell ’em that I don’t want to talk about it, okay? No more interventions where we share war stories in some ridiculous way of trying to one-up each other in how much shit we saw and did. I know that’s not what we’re doing, not really, but it feels like it sometimes. The war fucked us all, the end.”

  “Got it.” Danny nodded. “No problem. So, my beer’s gone flat and yours looks nearly empty. Want another?”

  Baxter nodded, relieved at the change of subject. “Yeah. Thanks, man.”

  “Anytime, dude.” Danny uncurled himself from the grass and got to his feet. “Anyone else want a beer?” he asked of his pack, Declan, and Liam.

  There was a resounding reply in the affirmative and Danny laughed.

  “Guess I’m grabbing an armload.”

  “Get Riley to help you,” Angelique said over her shoulder. “He needs to stop hiding. He can hang out with you and Sugar-puff.”

  Baxter threw his bottle cap at her. “Stop calling me that!”

  She laughed and returned her attention to her bike. Baxter looked around the yard again, noticing that Raphael had arrived with Israfel and Tabbris. Israfel was playing a guitar, and Tabbris was humming along.

  The two of them sat at the edge of the veranda, and Raphael was talking to Anna, another Venatores. Remiel arrived then—his partner, Ishtahar, and her two sons, Hiwa and Ahijah, with him—and a moment later, Samael, Uriel, Raziel, and Tzadkiel arrived. Metatron and Haniel were not far behind, and they carried large bowls full of food, the scents making Baxter’s mouth water. There was definitely curry involved somewhere, the delicate blend of garam marsala, turmeric, ginger, and lime making him lick his lips. They were all going to eat well tonight—Haniel made the best curries Baxter had ever eaten.

  Gabriel and Michael were walking hand-in-hand over to join the other Archangels, and they seemed happy. Baxter looked at them intently, noticing how they walked close together, how Michael angled himself toward Gabriel’s bulkier form. Although he was a head shorter than Gabriel, Michael carried himself with decorum and grace, light on his feet like a cat. Or a ninja. Baxter had the comic mental image of Michael with cat ears and a tail dancing around like a ninja he’d seen in the cartoons on the television that morning. He coughed to cover up the sudden laughter bubbling up inside him.

  That was a good sign, he thought. If he could laugh and think of other things so soon after talking about Turquoise Ridge, that meant he was getting better, getting a stronger handle on his PTSD. He knew that he’d never be completely over it; he’d talked with Lily about the nature of PTSD, long into the night when the two of them had sat outside an
d looked at the stars, sharing a bottle of vodka and a packet of cheap cigarettes, swapping stories. He hadn’t lied when he’d asked Danny not to get the rest of the pack involved in a group retelling of tales of hell on earth, but one-on-one conversations were quite different. He loved his pack, loved them more than he had previously thought himself capable of, but there were things he hadn’t told them and would never tell them. Some things were best kept private, Baxter thought. Some pain was not to be shared, not even with one’s pack or one’s true love.

  That thought made him look at Liam again. Liam and Declan were doing something entirely esoteric involving tools and the innards of the car. But Liam looked happy and Declan’s expression was one of intense concentration. Baxter felt a pang in his heart then, a sense of love so deep he had to take a breath and swallow several times. He loved this tall beautiful man, loved his handsome, muscular body, his shoulder-length light brown hair, and his changeable green-hazel eyes. He loved the laugh lines at the corners of those eyes and the way Liam’s lips always quirked upward, how he was always positive and could see something good in everything. He loved that Liam never asked him questions or pushed him to talk when Baxter woke in the dark of night, sweating and shaking, jerked out of a nightmare comprised of scenes of the Seventy Years War.

  He loved that Liam understood him and accepted him, that he enjoyed Baxter’s company and laughed at his jokes, and most of all, that Liam did not seem to want to change him. Liam seemed to love Baxter for himself, and Baxter loved Liam fiercely and completely in return.

  “Here.”

  Baxter started; he hadn’t noticed Danny come back or that he had Riley with him. Danny held out a bottle of beer, and Baxter took it with a nod of thanks. Danny drew up another deck chair and sat down, and Riley sat on the grass.

  “It seems we’re having a party,” Danny said.