Angels of Darkness

by Singh, Nalini, Andrews, Ilona

  But that wasn’t what had surprised her. Many Guardians changed their appearance over time, either to match the demands of their current mission or to blend in with a population. Even Radha had chosen a younger form than the fifty-year-old woman she’d been upon her human death, because after her transformation she’d felt younger. Guardians often took a form that reflected what they wanted to be, rather than what they’d once been.

  So what the hell had Marc been through that he appeared to bear the weight of the world on his shoulders? Radha didn’t know, and she hadn’t heard of any terrible loss that he’d suffered, or any soulbreaking trial that a demon might have put him through. And she would have heard of it. The Guardians’ gossip mill was as strong as any small town’s.

  Yet it hadn’t just been the loneliness or his apparent age. As he’d taken in Caelum’s destruction, he hadn’t seemed devastated as so many others were. He hadn’t seemed afraid. He’d seemed resigned.

  As if everything that had happened in the past years had left him little to hope for. As if it had left him little to live for. As if he were tired of fighting.

  As if he’d lost faith.

  She hadn’t believed it. Not Marc, not the man determined to be God’s chosen warrior at the cost of everything else. But the memory of his weary resignation had nagged at her, and even after the gathering ended, she’d worried for him.

  Like an idiot, she’d talked herself into coming here, to watch him in secret and determine whether there was truly anything to worry about. Not that she cared. But she was a Guardian, and Guardians took care of their own.

  Too bad that she’d forgotten how capable he was of sussing out the holes in her illusions.

  So she’d been found out, but Marc seemed all right, anyway. At least, he wasn’t flogging himself or crying in a bathroom somewhere. She could have gone.

  Except, maybe he wasn’t all right. He’d always been good at concealing his true feelings from her. After all, she’d spent thousands of hours with him over the course of a single year and never realized that he considered her the biblical equivalent of a diseased whore. So she’d wait a little longer and make certain.

  If she helped him track down a demon in the process, all the better. Slaying one was always fun—except for when it was difficult and horrifying. If that happened, it was best that she was here to back him up.

  He didn’t need the backup yet, though. The kid who came out of the school possessed a wide-open mind, and as soon as he spotted Marc, he trembled with uncertainty and excitement.

  So cute. Tall, a bit thin and awkward, with a mop of curly dark hair and determinedly nerdy glasses—but as soon as he grew into his body, Radha suspected the girls in the area would be in trouble.

  “Sam Briffee?”

  Marc held up his identification, and Radha took a quick look at it. Special Investigations. A legitimate federal law enforcement division, and a legitimate identification, thanks to an arrangement the Guardians had made with the United States government. Radha rarely operated in this country, so she didn’t have one.

  But then, she didn’t really need one. When Marc introduced himself as Special Agent Revoire, she held up a piece of paper. Surrounded by her illusions, the blank paper would feel and look like a real wallet and identification, even if the boy examined it up close. To her disappointment, he didn’t—but she had to grin when Marc glanced back at her and paused before saying,

  “. . . and this is Special Agent Bhattacharyya.”

  Impressive. He pronounced it correctly. It wasn’t really her surname—Radha didn’t bother with that ridiculousness—but she liked the rhythm of it.

  “I’m Sam.” Wary, the boy looked from Radha to Marc. “Why are you looking for me?”

  Marc kept his tone even, friendly. “Just to ask a few questions. Another investigation has opened up new leads in Jason Ward’s murder, and so we’re looking at a few details. We understand that you’re Miklia’s friend?”

  “Yeah,” the boy said. Then more strongly, “Yeah, I am. So his murder is connected to someone else’s?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out. Do you have a few minutes to talk? Not out here,” he added, when the boy hunched in his light jacket and looked up at the sky. “The diner across the street. Our treat.”

  “Yeah, all right.”

  Oh, teen boys and their stomachs. Too easy—but it might have been anyway. Curiosity filled him now, and anticipation. Maybe at having a story to tell his peers the next day, or simply at the possibility of learning some grisly detail about the crime.

  Maybe she’d show him fake photographs from the fake investigation into that other murder. It would support Marc’s cover story and give this boy a little something extra to talk about—and maybe confuse the demon enough that he’d ask questions about the supposed murder, revealing himself.

  Though Marc turned and waited, politely gesturing for her to start off first, she shook her head, indicating for him to go on ahead with the boy. This was his show. She’d take up the rear and listen to the other ways the demon revealed himself.

  From farther down the street, two people in one of the offices had begun arguing. Only snippets of the fight reached her ears, but it was exactly what she’d have expected.

  —You stood here yesterday and told me that! Are you saying now that you didn’t?—

  No. Whatever that person was being accused of lying about, he probably hadn’t said it. That was often how a demon worked: shape-shifting to resemble a real person, making promises to loved ones, spreading lies, destroying trust.

  And it was what made some demons so difficult to locate. Arrogant and vain, many demons chose to create their own human identity and form, often in the guise of a rich, handsome male, and hunting them was merely a matter of making certain he was a demon and finding an opportunity to slay him. But a demon who made a practice of shape-shifting posed a different challenge: though it often kept a default, day-to-day human identity, the demon could be anyone, at any time, and appearing in the form of a person that the Guardian had already determined wasn’t a demon. The low-level psychic sweeps Guardians performed wouldn’t differentiate human from demon—yet any stronger probes would reveal their own nature, which might send the demon running from Riverbend and starting again elsewhere.

  Losing him, unless Marc happened across another town at the right time. They wouldn’t want to take that risk.

  At the diner’s entrance, she vanished her wings rather than trying to maneuver them through the small space. Marc held the door open for her, waiting for her to pass through. Did federal agents bother with such niceties? Radha didn’t know. Assholes usually didn’t bother, and she wished that it was easier to remember that Marc was one. She wished that it was easier to forget how much she’d loved being with him, the conversations they’d had, and how well they’d fit together. She wished that he didn’t look at her now with the quiet concern that she knew had to be false—and she wished that he made his opinion of her overt instead of hiding it behind polite human rituals.

  A different sort of illusion, but one she didn’t appreciate.

  Inside, her own illusion was simple to maintain, creating a lighter echo of Marc’s footsteps to cover her lack of shoes. As they crossed to a booth in an empty corner, the wet tracks she left behind on the linoleum had to appear as if they came from leather soles rather than bare feet. The whisper of her scarves became the heavy sound of a wool coat sliding across a vinyl bench seat. Perhaps she missed a few small reflections in the spoons she passed, in the silver carafe of syrup, in the shining wire that made up the baskets holding the jellies, but she altered the reflections in the windows and in the gleaming tabletop.

  No one but Marc would look any closer. No one but Marc would know to look any closer—and that likely included a demon. If she felt a sudden burst of confusion from one of the people in the diner, she’d know that some part of her illusion needed attention. After she fixed it, humans were usually satisfied, convincing
themselves that whatever they’d originally seen had probably been a trick of the light.

  Neither Radha nor any other Guardian ignored those feelings. Demons couldn’t cast illusions and didn’t possess Gifts, but if something seemed wrong for any reason, appeared impossible, or just something to dismiss as a trick of the light . . . it probably was wrong.

  Those little things were often what gave shape-shifting demons away.

  Marc slid in next to her, facing the boy. The diner wasn’t busy, and the waitress came as soon as they settled. Sam ordered a plate of fries and a soda. Radha liked both and ordered the same, hoping that Marc intended to pay for it. She didn’t carry American money, liked her jewelry too much to give it up, and would probably feel a niggle of guilt for passing a piece of blank paper off as a twenty-dollar bill.

  Marc requested a black coffee, but let it sit in front of him. He focused on Sam. “How long have you been friends with Miklia?”

  “Eighth grade.” The kid wriggled out of his backpack, let it flop onto the bench beside him. “Her family moved in from Topeka.”

  “Almost four years,” Marc said. “So you must have met her brother, Jason.”

  “A few times, yeah. Not at her house, not after he graduated and moved out, but I saw him at the video store some nights. It’s not there now, though. They just put in one of those vending machines at the grocery.” He shook his head. “No good movies at all.”

  “I watch mine online,” Radha said, though it wasn’t at all true. There were few better illusionists than moviemakers, and films were best enjoyed on a large scale. She preferred theaters in the cities, dark and cool, surrounded by a crowd of humans.

  “My connection at home sucks, and the library isn’t any good for that, not with old Mrs. Carroll always looking over my shoulder or cutting me off after twenty minutes, so . . .” The kid shrugged. “I’m out of luck.”

  Their sodas arrived, with a paper-wrapped straw dropped next to each glass. Marc thanked the waitress and waited until she’d moved away before asking Sam, “But you’re over at Miklia’s house often, aren’t you? I noticed they have a big collection of DVDs.”

  “Yeah, they’re all movie buffs.” Sam stabbed his straw past the cubes of ice. “But I haven’t been over there so much lately. It’s been a rough time for her. For all of them, I guess. So, you know, I gave her some space.”

  The resentment suddenly boiling from him didn’t echo the concern and support in his voice—and was probably what Marc had been aiming for. People often talked for two reasons: because they wanted to help or because they needed to air a grievance.

  Radha hadn’t expected this boy’s reason would be the second. “I imagine that losing her brother affected her. Any sudden death is a huge change for a family. Did she change, too?”

  “Oh, yeah. She started hanging out with Lynn, Ines, Jessica. All of them, they’ve been in her face since she moved here. We called them the Brainless Bitches. Now she’s their BFF.” He rolled his eyes. “But she needed space, time to think. She’s going through stuff.”

  And more resentment. Marc obviously didn’t miss it, either. “But you’d have given her more support.”

  “I’ve been there since eighth grade! I understand her better, could help her out. Instead it’s a waste of four years.”

  Selfish little twit. “Your friendship was a waste?”

  “What would you call it?”

  He probably didn’t really want to hear Radha’s answer. But since the fries plonked down in front of her, she reached for them instead. Let Marc take this. He glanced at her, tilted a bottle of ketchup her way.

  Yuck. “No, thanks.”

  He looked to Sam. “A waste, then.”

  “Yeah.” The boy shook half a bottle of tomato goop over his fries and dug in. “All these years, I’ve been waiting for her to see that I’m not like them, not like any jerk. I treat her right—listening to her, being her friend—and she turns to someone else.”

  “But it should have been you?”

  “Yeah. I mean—Whatever. But, yeah. It should count for something.”

  Maybe Marc agreed with him, maybe not. Radha couldn’t tell. But since he hadn’t taken a drink of his coffee yet, she floated an eyeball in it.

  It was always the little things that gave them away. Not eating or drinking was one of them.

  Marc glanced down at his cup. His lips curved a little—why did that have to be sexy instead of making him look like a smarmy asshole?—but he took the hint, and took a sip. He didn’t choke when she added the sensation of the floating eyeball bumping into his lip, just smiled a bit more, this time directing it at her.

  Next time she’d just tell him to take a drink. That wouldn’t be any fun, but maybe that was the problem. She remembered all too well how fun he’d been—so unflappable, so solid, no matter what she threw at him. It made her want to forget how a few of his words had stabbed through her heart.

  She never liked dwelling on anything that had once hurt her. She liked to forget it. With Marc, she had to remember, or she’d probably find herself in the same situation again.

  When Marc set the cup back down, no eyeball looked up at him. Whether that disappointed him or not, she didn’t know. He simply asked Sam, “But you were still close friends when her brother died?”

  “Yeah. Well, mostly.”

  Marc’s brows lifted. He hadn’t expected that. “Mostly?”

  “Not so much. She’d already started hanging out with them.”

  “But I thought the change came because he’d died.”

  “Well, yeah. That was after. I mean, it was really obvious after that.” A flush started up the boy’s neck. “Homecoming, right? That’s the night he was killed. I remember, because I asked Miklia to go with me. Just as friends, okay? But I thought, maybe if she saw how I treated her well, how I was a great date, something more might finally happen. Four years, man. But she said homecoming was silly—and then showed up at the dance with the Brainless Bitches.”

  “That had to sting,” Marc said.

  “Yeah. But her brother was killed that night sometime.”

  “Did she seem upset at the dance?”

  Radha shoved another fry into her mouth, reminding herself to keep silent. No doubt this kid had been keeping an eye on Miklia that night. Resenting every second.

  “No, she wasn’t upset. She just sat at a table with the other three. They left early. I don’t know where they went.” He shrugged and swiped through a pool of ketchup with his last fry. “Maybe to Perk’s Palace. That’s where they always seem to be now.”

  “The coffee shop?”

  “Yeah. Because that’s where Gregory works.”

  A little sneer accompanied the name. Marc didn’t let it pass by. “Gregory?”

  “Yeah. Gregory Jackson. Not Greg, of course. Gregory.” Sam shook his head, disgust clear. “New kid this year. He’s supposed to be some big shot quarterback from a school in Chicago, right? Except he tore his knee up or something, and they moved here, his mom opened that shop. But he thinks he’s better than all of us.”

  Radha’s interest piqued. Marc leaned forward, expression intent.

  “Better? How so?”

  Sam shrugged. “I don’t know, it’s just an attitude I get from him. Last fall he partnered with Miklia a few times in chemistry, and someone caught them sucking face in the weight room, and that’s when she started backing off from me. Like she’s comparing us. And I came out on the bad side, even though he’s not there half the time now.”

  “Not there . . . ? Class, or Perk’s Palace?”

  “Class. And even when he is, he’s just half asleep through most of it.”

  “But does he do well anyway? His grades are all right?”

  “I guess so, yeah. He doesn’t seem to try hard at anything, but he still gets everything. Even Miklia. And now she’s doing the same thing. Her parents never notice anything, so they wouldn’t notice that she’s skipping half her classes or that she’s c
oming in late to first period—like this morning. She was probably with him all night.”

  Oh, now that was bitter. Radha hoped he was wrong about Miklia being with him—though not for Sam’s sake. A lot of what he’d just described sounded like a scaled-back version of a demon. They didn’t usually take a kid’s form long term, but a high school quarterback might have just enough influence within the school to be appealing, and it wouldn’t be the typical place for a Guardian to look for one.

  But in the wake of the kid’s rising frustration, Marc returned to their supposed investigation. Good call. They had the info to seek out this Gregory. No need to alienate Sam in the process by forcing him to talk about someone he obviously considered a rival.

  “After Jason died, was Miklia the one who told you?”

  “No. No, my mom did. I tried to call Miklia right away, to see if she was okay, but I couldn’t really get through. And when I finally just went over to her house about a few days later—I thought she might need me, you know?—the Brainless Bitches were in her room with her. It was weird, so I left without really saying anything.”

  “You didn’t see her at school?”

  “No, she missed the whole week. And after that, she was just . . . cold.” He shook his head. “I don’t know, I’m done with her.”

  Radha couldn’t stop herself. “Because you already wasted too much time.”

  “Yeah. I know, right?” He let out a heavy breath, checked his watch. “Anyway. Anything else? I gotta get home.”

  “No, thank you.” Marc slipped a card across the table. “Call me if you remember something else, any little detail that you think might be relevant. Someone hanging around her house, something that seems out of place.”

  “Okay. Right. I will.” He slid out of the bench, hefted his backpack over his shoulder. “Thanks for the grub.”

  Marc inclined his head, waited until Sam had walked out of earshot before opening his mouth. Radha beat him to it.