by Debra Dunbar
“The energy signature on this wing mark is completely different from the one on the guy. Two angels were here,” I insisted.
“Is the blood from the first angel or the second?” Candy said, her brows knitted in concentration. “Could one angel have killed the guy, left, then another came here, did the weird abdomen cut, then was surprised and killed the female?”
“I don’t know,” I replied slowly. “I have the DNA signature off the blood on the claws of the female, but that’s different from energy signatures. I can’t tell whether the blood DNA belongs to the first or second angel.” I was so frustrated. I thought I had it all, and here was that big old monkey wrench.
“Let’s just watch the video,” Wyatt said from over by the bookshelves. He was holding a small round device. “It’s a security camera. I have these at my house. This one is active right now and feeding to the computer up in the office.”
Jackpot!
Chapter 11
Up the stairs we went, with Candy carrying my clothing and trying several times to encourage me to put them back on. Just to irritate her, I ignored her motions and continued to walk around buck naked.
Wyatt quickly overcame the passwords on the upstairs computer and we watched six grainy black and white boxes of video displaying boring images of people walking about, eating, watching TV. The majority of the recording time was just empty blank rooms. Wyatt sectioned out and expanded the downstairs camera, but the resolution was horrible blown up. He reduced it to a more clear size and zipped through the time code stamp on the lower corner of the image. At nine in the evening, the female werewolf clicked off the TV, kissed the male who was on the laptop and said some indecipherable words to him before heading up the stairs.
“The audio on these cameras is horrible, so I don’t think we’re going to know what they are saying,” Wyatt said.
Wyatt fast forwarded slowly until a few minutes after ten, when the male werewolf looked like he was ready to get up. He stood and stretched a bit, then sat down to do a few more things on the laptop.
“Based on the laptop record, he was just doing some random surfing. News site, clicked on a few links, nothing noteworthy,” Wyatt pointed out.
Hmm, no illicit porn surfing, snuff videos, or werewolf revolutionary front chat rooms. I didn’t see where this guy could possibly have violated the admittedly strict existence contract. He was squeaky clean, from what I could tell.
A dark shape appeared quickly in the room. “Whoa,” Wyatt said, freezing the screen and backing it up a frame at a time.
At ten twelve PM, a dark shape showed at the edge of the stairs, quickly, and silently, approached the werewolf from the rear, and snapped his neck with a smooth, clean motion. He had to have been amazingly strong to have done that, even with the element of surprise on his side. The werewolf fell back and sideways out of the chair as his body attempted to follow the movement of his head. We couldn’t see the angel’s face clearly from the poor quality of the picture and the angle of the camera, but it didn’t matter to me. I had his energy signature; I didn’t need to know what he looked like.
The angel paused, kneeling for some time beside the werewolf before bending down and placing his hand on the temple. A blur appeared around his hand and he withdrew it to stare at the body again.
“What is taking the stupid shit so long?” I muttered. “Does he want to get caught or something? I would have been halfway to Baltimore by now.”
Finally, he reached down with a finger and a blaze of light traced the cut in the body’s midsection. A scream bellowed out of the computer and we all jumped with hearts racing. The whole death had been silent, and I, for one, had forgotten that there was a soundtrack, no matter how shitty. The female werewolf stood at the bottom of the stairs.
Wyatt was forced to move frame by frame at this point to keep everything from being a blur of speed in real time. Crap, these people were fast, fast. The female had screamed, and simultaneously her claws and snout shot out as the angel whirled around, energy flaring. He lashed at her with energy bursts and moved to the side as if trying to push her away from the stairs. She held her location blocking the stairs, but advanced toward him and managed to rake him twice. Once across the face with her right, and a downward strike from his right shoulder with her left.
It was remarkable she’d been able to advance at all with the energy bursts he was tossing around. Reeling from the claw marks, the angel brought energy in a steady stream, a blade shape up from his left, slicing the deep fatal cut into her right thigh. Dissolving the blade, he grabbed the front of her shirt and flung her up against the wall as he dashed from the room and up the stairs. The rest of the video showed her frame by frame sliding down the wall to rest in a crumpled heap of spreading blood. Wyatt paused the video.
“One angel killed them both,” he said.
“Yes, but he ran out before she had hit the wall. I wonder if he even knew he’d killed her?” I mused. “And where is the second angel. There is a second angel.” I insisted.
Wyatt fast forwarded the video and for a few speeded up seconds we saw the blood pool expand across the carpet, then a whole lot of nothing for hours. Finally, as the time clock showed around one in the morning, a blurred figure appeared.
“Whoa, there he is!” I shouted. As if I was the only one who noticed.
Wyatt backed up the video and we saw the angel descend the stairs to stop at the bottom and scan the room. He was tall and built like a bull. It looked to my eyes to be the same angel as in The Wine Room.
“Do they all look alike? Because I’m thinking that is the one from the bar earlier this week.” I asked Candy.
Wyatt paused the video and looked up. “What do you mean ‘the one from the bar earlier this week’? You told me you had an angel after you, but you didn’t tell me you had seen one up close and personal.”
“No, they don’t all look alike, although they have similarities,” Candy explained. She turned to Wyatt. “That’s Gregory,” she said pointing to the screen. “He’s the angel that kills any demons who cross into this world. We saw him last Friday at The Wine Room.”
Wyatt glared at me. He was pissed that I’d neglected to tell him that particular detail when I’d let him know that angels were after me. I felt guilty and it was a weird feeling. I knew what guilt felt like. The humans I owned had all felt guilt many times in their lives, and I had all their memories and feelings stored within me. I didn’t like feeling guilty, myself. I’d really been wearing this human form too long and leaning too heavily on human memories. Why would I tell him? It’s not like he could do anything to help me out. He’d just worry and do some stupid human macho thing that would get him killed. I didn’t know what to say.
Wyatt stared long enough for me to feel even more uncomfortable, then turned around and resumed the video. Gregory walked over to the male victim and looked at him carefully without touching him. He shook his head, but it was hard to read his expression from the poor quality of the tape. He walked over to the female and glanced up at the smear on the wall. Then he bent down over the female.
“Slow it down,” I told Wyatt, leaning in. “Frame by frame.”
The angel examined her wounds and ran a hand over her rounded belly, less than an inch from the surface. Checking the baby for life? In the slow motion of the frame by frame I saw him reach his other hand to her temple and a flash of light as he left the wing mark.
“Wait,” I shouted to Wyatt. “Back it up one more frame.” There. Was there a flash of light from his other hand too? I darted from the room and charged down the stairs to the bodies. Pressing my hand against the female’s belly, I searched and searched and found. There. An energy signature. A mark of angels wings on the temple of the fetus’ head.
Wyatt and Candy reached the downstairs just as I stood up. “He marked the baby,” I told them, and I was feeling pretty outraged about it. ”He put the angel’s wings on the baby’s head. And on the female’s. What the fuck? The mark is suppose
d to be a sign of guilt. He’s covering it up. Althean fucked up and killed an innocent female and an unborn child, and Gregory covered it up by marking them as if they were guilty of a crime. How could an unborn child ever be guilty of a crime? It’s against their creed.”
“They are all innocent,” Candy said indignantly. “Hundreds of kills in the past five years and we can’t tell they’ve done anything wrong.”
“Yes, but they can always twist the contract, find some tiny little detail somewhere to justify it. Nothing justifies this,” I gestured to the pregnant female. “Is Gregory in on it, too? Or is he cleaning up Althean’s mess and hoping to catch him and set him right before the other angels discover his misdeeds and come down on his head as the boss? Because with this, it’s going to be a very short time before Althean finds himself in deep angel doo–doo.”
We reviewed the rest of the video, but found nothing else beyond long stretches of no activity punctuated by the local werewolves and their investigative efforts, then us arriving. Wyatt took the laptop thinking he might find something in there that would have caused this couple to be a target, or even be on the angel’s radar.
“Do you still have the information on your predictions?” I asked Wyatt. “That repression analysis you did?”
“Regression analysis. I’ll add in this data and we should be able to narrow things down further. He’s definitely moving faster. If we can identify one or two targets, we’ll need to think about how we’re going to handle it. Probably some kind of stake out, since alarms and such won’t give us enough time to arrive all the way from Maryland and catch him in the act.”
Stake out. The thought depressed me.
We drove to a nearby breakfast diner so Wyatt could run his registration analysis and we could all have Moons Over My Hammy with some much needed coffee.
Candy and I were arguing over my supposedly excessive ketchup use on the hash browns, when Wyatt interrupted us by shoving his tablet in our faces.
“There,” Wyatt said pointing at the map. “These three places are very close together and all within the modified predictive line. I’m worried about the timeline though. My model shows two to three days, but I don’t have enough recent data points, and it could be as soon as tomorrow.”
“Gettysburg,” Candy said looking at the map. “Let’s head there now, grab the closest hotel room to these three likely spots, and then hit the outlets for a couple changes of clothes and toiletries. We’ll reconnaissance the spots today, well before we think the hit will be, then be ready tonight and tomorrow. We’ll just pull this straight through. We really need to catch him this week, before his trajectory takes him further away from home and we have to deal with travel.”
“Cool, we can go down Route 30,” I told her. “It goes straight into Gettysburg.”
Wyatt looked at me with disgust. “Not Route 30, again. We just crawled down there, and now we have to go back?”
“It is the quickest way to Gettysburg,” Candy told him.
So back down Route 30 we went. Traffic wasn’t quite as slow, but it was steady and crowded through all the tiny little towns. As we got closer in to Gettysburg, the small houses in various stages of neglect got closer together and became more interspersed with an eclectic array of businesses. There were used car lots, thrift shops, a sheet metal manufacturer, tile wholesaler, and, oddly, a gourmet tobacco store.
The modern houses gave way to restored Victorian homes as we entered the city limits, then majestic historic mansions and row houses as we entered downtown Gettysburg. The historic knickknack shops, coffee houses, inns and restaurants enchanted me. Crowds of people peering at brochures choked the streets and sidewalks. At my insistence, we searched the downtown inns only to find that none had any vacancies. A helpful coffee house employee informed us that this was the height of their tourist season and we probably wouldn’t find anything this close to the battlefield. He recommended we head back north out of town, closer to the highway, where some privately owned motels may have vacancies.
Hours later, we were tired and grumpy from the endless stream of ‘no vacancy’ signs when we finally found a place. It was fairly close to the houses we needed to investigate, but was by no means our first pick of sleeping quarters.
Our home away from home was one of those two story local owned motels popular fifty years ago. The white paint was patched in not–quite matching colors all over the cement block walls. I hadn’t realized white came in so many shades. The doors and trim were a thick red, as if twenty layers of glossy paint had been stacked on top of each other over the decades. Chips along the door and window frames revealed the trim had at times been green, blue, and a lovely shade of baby poop yellow. Judging from the frequency that cars came and left from the parking lot, the motel mostly catered to a rent–by–the–hour crowd.
The guy at the front desk took one look at hot young Wyatt in the company of two middle aged women and made some pretty lurid assumptions based on his expression. He took a bit of convincing that we were indeed planning to stay at least the night, if not several days. Candy begged and badgered, but couldn’t get him to give us a ground floor room. I wondered if they were reserved for the hour rentals. People could make quick getaways if needed, maybe out a back window. Plus, ground floor would be easier for the frequent maid service needed with hourly rentals. That is, if they bothered to clean between rentals. Ick.
It had become overcast as we left York. A kind of hot humidity filled the air as it always does in mid August and I doubted whether the threatened rain would cool things off. The old air conditioning units whirred and hummed away, spewing hot air at us as we climbed the cement stairs and headed down the outside hallway toward our room. Ours was the one with the big pool of air conditioning water spilling across the walk and dripping down onto the parking lot below. I imagined the cold dirty water dropping down on some unsuspecting cheating person as they went in to meet up for an afternoon delight. The inside wasn’t terrible, but I could tell by Candy’s face that this was a huge sacrifice in comfort on her part. Two double beds with cheap floral bedspreads were crammed in the room with just enough space to squeeze by them and the fiberboard dresser placed against the opposite wall. An old TV squatted on top of the dresser, and the beds shared a painted plywood bedside table with a phone and a cheap alarm clock. Laminated and firmly taped to the bedside table was a sheet indicating various charges for phone calls, and pay movies.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Wyatt said as he walked over to the TV. I thought he was referring to the age, poor quality, and limited channels of the unit. He reached up and grabbed the remote off the top and I saw it had been drilled and outfitted with a ring which was connected by a long metal chain to an identical ring on the TV. I laughed. All that trouble to safeguard a ten dollar universal remote. If we really wanted to steal it, a good set of tin snips, heck probably a decent pocket knife, could have freed it from the chain. Or we could have just grabbed the TV too.
“What, no mini bar? No room service?” I asked, delighted. I was enchanted by the place. Sleazy sex downstairs, tacky theft prevention. I wondered if the bed vibrated. Yes! There was a coin operated box on the side. I dug around for a quarter and threw myself on the bed to enjoy the ride. Better than the kiddy rides outside Walmart.
Candy was not so amused. She looked as though she was about ready to grab some Clorox wipes and go to town. The expression on her face as I set the bed to shaking was priceless. This was going to be the most fun hunt ever. More fun even then catching that sorcerer for the elves a few centuries back.
Candy pointed to the bed closest to the door. The one I wasn’t lying on.
“This is my bed. I don’t want to see you sleeping in it, I don’t want you having sex in it with him or anyone, or even by yourself. I don’t want anything involving bodily fluids going on in this bed. In fact, I don’t even want you to sit on it. Especially not naked. You too,” she added as an afterthought pointing at Wyatt.
“What i
f I put a plastic bag down first?” I asked playfully. “I can spray some disinfectant on it afterward to kill the germs.”
Candy glared at me. I guess that was a no.
There were some logistical negotiations regarding the shopping expedition. It was silly for us all to go out to buy toothbrushes and cheap jeans, but Candy was afraid to let me shop for her and Wyatt needed incomprehensible stuff at an electronics store. I think he was a little worried about me shopping for him too. He should have been. I purchased more on entertainment value than fashion sense. With me in charge, Candy was liable to end up in a French maid outfit and Wyatt in a bondage harness.
Finally, Candy took down our sizes and preferences and agreed to do the clothing and necessity shopping. She was immersed in one of her lists when I decided that I just had to do something this afternoon or I’d explode.
“Go with Candy,” I told Wyatt. “There’s got to be an electronics store at the outlets. I’m going to go canvass one of our three potential sites.”
“It’s starting to rain,” Candy noted. “Why don’t you wait until I get a change of clothes for you?”
“I’m really fidgety. I can’t hang out here for hours and watch network TV or porn.” I had to get out of that hotel room and shake the wiggles out or I’d be liable to make poor decisions later. “The one site is only three miles from here and it’s not raining hard. I think I’m going to jog.”
“Cool, I can take your car then,” Wyatt said before the words left my mouth.
“Nope. Nobody drives my car.” Like nobody sits on Candy’s bed, I thought.
“It will be faster if we don’t have to ride together. I swear I’ll be careful.”
“No.”
“Sam, I’ve known you for two years. You can trust me to take good care of it. I know how much it means to you.”
“No.”
“You trust me with the key to your safe, to take care of all your affairs if needed, but you won’t let me drive your car?”