Angeli Trilogy: Angeli Books 1-3 Page 12

  “Perfidian?”

  “Similar, but no. I can’t put my finger on it.”

  “Very strong,” Anne shuddered, recalling the violence of the attack.

  “Very,” Michael agreed. “It kept up with me, briefly, after I took you. Then it seemed to conclude the chase wasn’t worth the effort. I fear it decided there would be an easier time to complete its task.”

  “Which is?”

  Michael shrugged. “Killing you, I imagine.”

  Anne sighed. “I knew you were going to say that.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Anne returned to her room at the Maryland Inn feeling as bruised emotionally as she had been physically. Every time she thought she’d defined her relationship with Michael, he did something to rewrite the romantic dictionary. In addition, she could usually make it a few days into a job before someone tried to kill her. She wished someone would tell whatever attacked her to stick to the accepted timeline.

  Anne found Jeffrey sitting on the sofa in their suite, reading a book. He was reading a trashy romance novel that someone had left in the room. Strange, but given Jeffrey’s various quirks, Anne didn’t find it terribly unusual. He could have been looking for cheesy lines to put on his t-shirts, probably directly next to her photo.

  Jeffrey seemed engrossed in the story, but Anne noticed that he held the book upside down. She didn’t know he could read upside down.

  “How’s that book?” Anne asked, pretending not to notice its position.

  “Oh good, good,” Jeffrey feigned becoming even more interested, and then hastily righting the dog-eared paperback. He glanced up to see if she had noticed, but she turned away to hide that she’d seen his mistake.

  Anne needed to get a quick shower and change clothing. She entered her room cautiously, assuming Jeffrey’s odd behavior masked his guilt, or glee, over whatever he had booby-trapped in her absence in revenge for her painting his face with mascara. The last thing her frazzled nerves needed was to sit on a toilet seat with snap cap firecrackers beneath the seat, a favorite joke of Jeffrey’s. She gave him credit, that was a good one, but she really didn’t need it right now.

  Anne’s scratches and broken bones had healed, but her clothing did not possess the same regenerative powers as her flesh. She disrobed and threw yet another ruined outfit into the small trashcan.

  The Angeli should provide me with a clothing stipend.

  Anne washed the blood off her arms and knees and fished in her drawer for a clean polo.

  “How was your morning?” Jeffrey called from the other room.

  Anne stuck her head out to be sure he wasn’t sneaking towards her, the question used as a distraction. He remained on the sofa, the novel sitting at his side. She tucked back into her room without answering.

  Anne found her notebook of lists by her bedside and made a few adjustments, adding items four through six.

  TO DO

  Find out why in Annapolis

  Revenge against Jeffrey

  Find out who killed people in mass grave

  Find out what Michael’s hiding

  Find out who attacked me

  Find out what Jeffrey is up to

  Anne grimaced. Adding new items drove her insane. She often added items she’d already done, just to have the satisfaction of crossing them off. A list growing instead of shortening was almost worse than tumbling down a brick alley.

  “Hello?” called Jeffrey, still waiting for an answer.

  “What?” Anne called back, chewing on the end of her pen as she studied the list.

  “I said how was your morning?”

  “Oh. My morning?” Anne closed the notebook with a snap and continued getting dressed. “Well, we have a pit full of dead bodies over at the Brice House,” she called loud enough for Jeffrey to hear.

  Anne thrust her cell phone, credit card and a few dollars into the pocket of her khaki shorts.

  “Did you say ‘a pit full of dead bodies?’” asked Jeffrey. “Or a Pitbull of head bobbies?”

  Anne walked to her doorway to stare at Jeffrey.

  “A Pitbull of head bobbies?” she asked. “What the hell is a head bobby and how would they get in a Pitbull?”

  “Those things in cars,” Jeffery bobbed his head. “You know.”

  “No, not head bobbies,” Anne said, stepping back to turn off her bedroom light.

  Jeffery nodded. “So it was a pit full of dead bodies. I thought so.”

  Anne walked back into the living room.

  “Yep, and they were in a pit with no entrance or exit. The bodies inside ranged from maybe hundreds of years to three years dead.”

  “Janey Mack!” said Jeffrey, slapping the sofa beside him and making the book lying there jump. “That far apart?”

  Preparing to sit in the chair across from him, Anne stopped in mid-air to squint at Jeffrey.

  Janey Mack? That was an Irish phrase...

  “What did you say?” she asked.

  Jeffrey fidgeted. “I said I can’t believe the time range from the oldest to newest dead fellows.”

  Anne scowled “Uh huh. Before that.”

  “Come again?”

  “What did you say before the bit about how far apart the deaths were?”

  Jeffrey rolled his eyes. “Tut tut, I don’t know Anne, what does it matter? My point is you’ve got a killer in town and no doubt he’s a dirty Angelus.”

  “Tut tut,” Anne echoed to herself. She nodded and stretched to crack her stiff back, still holding her gaze on Jeffrey. She glanced back at the bedroom wishing she’d brought her notebook out with her. She felt confident she could scratch off find out what Jeffrey is up to now.

  “Seems like we have a monster in town. One that nearly killed me, too.”

  “Killed you? How? Who?” Jeffrey stood and he moved towards Anne with his arms outstretched. “Are you ok? You do look a bit knackered, uh, knocked up, I mean, around. Knocked around. Tut, tut, and all that.”

  “I’m fine now,” Anne stood and moved away from Jeffrey before he could touch her, yawning and stretching as she walked to the mini bar.

  “Michael saved me, of course,” she said, opening the small refrigerator. She noted all the little bottles of whiskey were gone.

  “Michael,” Jeffrey repeated. If a word could be made of ice, the name would have left his lips, fallen to the floor and shattered.

  Anne closed the mini fridge and turned to face Jeffrey.

  “Yep. He swooped in and knocked the beast away from me, then he scooped me into his arms and we flew to the rooftops.” Anne added a dramatic flourish to the end of her sentence, throwing her arms in the air like a dancer. “It was wonderful. He is so strong. Have I ever told you how strong he is?”

  Jeffrey stood glaring at Anne, his right cheek twitching. Anne pointed to it.

  “You’ve got some sort of facial tic there, Jeffrey.”

  Jeffrey looked away, put his hands on his hips and gave a loud huff of relief.

  “You’re teasing me,” he said, now with Con’s Irish accent.

  “Well, you deserve it. Jeffrey is going to kill you when he finds out you’ve borrowed him. You promised not to do that to him anymore.”

  “I know, but he won’t find out. I’ll put him back where I found him.” He shrugged. “And Jeffrey can’t stand my arse anyway. Why keep him happy?”

  Anne shook her head. There was no arguing with that logic.

  “So tell me more about the attack, are you all right? Who was it?”

  “I’m not even sure what it was,” Anne replayed the monster’s buzzing blitzkrieg in her mind and shivered. Embarrassed, she pushed away the fear with a wave of angry self-recrimination. She hadn’t come so close to losing a fight since her very early years as a Sentinel.

  “It drained me, so it was definitely a Perfidian, but…”

  “Was it a he or a she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “I don’t know. But re
member when we were attacked in Mexico City...” Anne paused, realizing how silly the question sounded.

  Con pointed to Jeffrey’s body. “Nooo... I don’t remember that at all. Tell me about it.”

  “Sorry. Of course, you remember it. What I mean is, when we were attacked by the Perfidian who took you, remember how it made us sick?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “When I was just attacked in the alley, it felt like that. Every time I siphoned energy from that creature, it was like draining a Perfidian but entirely sickening.”

  Agitated, Con ran his hand through his hair, and then looked at his hand, confused by the feeling of Jeffrey’s hair products. He shook his head and began to pace. Anne watched as he gathered his thoughts, amused to see Con’s crude swagger in Jeffrey’s usually graceful body. She sighed through her nose, thinking how wonderful it would be to see Con again as Con.

  “You know, I’ve had some thoughts since this all happened to me,” Con said, motioning to his borrowed body. “You know how the Angeli look like humans, but we know they’re really big dodgy balls of energy?”

  “That description is a bit colored, but yes.”

  “Who’s to say they have to take a human form all the time? What if that thing in Mexico City and now this thing in the alley weren’t Perfidia, but Angeli in disguise pretending to be a Perfidian?”

  “But an Angelus wouldn’t do evil like that. Only the Perfidia disease makes them act against their nature.”

  “Who says?” barked Con. “What do we really know? The Angeli didn’t think Perfidia could ever happen either, and look where that got them.”

  Anne stared at Con. She had never considered the possibility. The Angeli had always appeared to her as human, older or younger, each with his or her own look from which they varied little. When traveling or in battle, they would assume their energy form. The glowing blue ball of electricity generally remained vaguely human in shape, though it could become more amorphous like her attacker in the alley. Those two options, human or blue light, were the full menu, as far as she knew. Certainly, nothing as dark and strange as the monster with whom she’d just danced.

  “I guess I could ask Michael about it. I mean, if it is possible.”

  “Do that. Why wouldn’t he tell you the truth, being Angeli himself?” He picked up a small ornamental bowl on the table and began to twirl it around in his hands, agitated.

  “Well it doesn’t hurt to ask.”

  “You know, I came up here to show you something yesterday,” said Con, his jaw clenched and the bowl spinning faster in his hands. “You could have been a bit more polite.”

  Anne rolled her eyes. “You came up as a tiny child. You can’t do that sort of thing.”

  “I only needed her for a moment to talk to you.”

  Anne’s head began to ache again. She didn’t want to argue with Con, especially when he looked like Jeffrey. It was like having an argument with two people at the same time, and it promised to be twice as exhausting.

  “Con,” she said, holding her head in her hands. “Get out of Jeffrey, will you? I’ve had a really long day and I don’t want to sit here arguing with you about whether it is right or wrong to temporarily kidnap a small girl, and I really don’t want to argue with you while you’re Jeffrey.”

  Anne lifted her head in time to see Con’s eyes flash with anger.

  “Well, how the hell am I supposed to talk to you?” He dashed the bowl he’d been playing with to the floor. The thick ceramic bounced on the carpet and rolled against the wall without breaking.

  “It’s not like they sell bodies at the bleedin’ corner store,” continued Con. “I have to borrow these people. Do you think this is easy for me? Do you think I would have borrowed a little girl if I didn’t have to?”

  Anne found herself shocked into silence by both the throwing of the bowl and the fact that, while Con could be explosive, Anne had never seen Jeffrey that angry. It made the entire effect surreal.

  Anne noticed something else. Jeffrey’s eyes glistened with tears.

  “Are you crying?”

  Con whirled and stormed out the door, slamming it behind him.

  “Con!” Anne flung open the door and ran after him, nearly tripping on Jeffrey, who now sat in the middle of the hallway. Jeffrey’s head was on his knees, and at the sound of the door opening, he looked up and then balled up, afraid Anne would step on him. Remaining untouched, he looked up at her.

  “What am I doing in the hallway?” he asked.

  Anne sighed and held out a hand to help him up.

  Jeffrey stood with Anne’s help and steadied himself against the wall.

  “Was I roofied during a tour of Historical Annapolis?” Jeffrey mumbled, rubbing his eyes with an open palm. “The girl in the gray bonnet was a bit shifty. And I don’t think real colonial women wore bolts through their noses.”

  Anne looked away, trying to invent the best way to change the subject.

  “Hold the phone,” said Jeffrey, throwing up an open palm. “Did I just hear you scream Con?”

  Anne grimaced, caught with no believable lie available. She turned back to Jeffrey and offered a weak smile as her only answer. She watched as her assistant’s face clouded.

  “I am going to kill him!” he screamed.

  Jeffrey stormed back into the room, leaving Anne in the hallway. She winced as a second door slammed in her face.

  Anne glanced at the stairs that led down to the lobby, looked back at the door of the suite, and decided to opt for the stairs. They offered her two good options; maybe she could find Con, and maybe a quick drink at the hotel bar was in order while Jeffrey’s temper cooled. Anne couldn’t stand the idea of going back to the room to have another argument with Jeffrey, only this time with Jeffrey playing the part of Jeffrey.

  * * *

  Anne went downstairs, calling to Con as loudly as she dared without drawing the attention of other hotel guests. Getting no response, she went to the King of France Tavern located in the lower level of the hotel, and ordered herself a vodka and soda with a splash of cranberry. The juice made her feel like she was doing something healthy for herself, even if that wasn’t the case. It didn’t really matter. She hadn’t had a cold in nearly three hundred years and her liver was safe.

  After a five-minute debate over her legal age, the bartender finally poured her a drink, saving Anne what could have been a disastrous return to the room to retrieve her identification.

  Anne took her scrambled thoughts and laid them out neatly for examination. Michael was angry with her for having feelings for Con and for lacking the gift of immortality. She felt her blood rise at the very idea that Michael thought she needed his constant protection, even if his appearance in the alley was seminal to the fact she was still breathing.

  Con was angry because she didn’t like his recent pick for host. She had let him down, and she was all he had. It was easy to forget, with his easy humor and playful disposition that the man was suffering. She couldn’t really understand what it was like to have no body; to be unable to engage in the simplest conversation without speaking through the lips of another. She imagined it must be hard for Con to keep a solid sense of self when he still had his brain, but could never look in the mirror and see himself looking back. And on some level, it was her fault that he had no body. He had lost it protecting her.

  She reaped supernatural beings for a living. She couldn’t help but wonder why her resume was starting to read like that of a professional damsel in distress.

  Upstairs, Jeffrey was stewing, no doubt feeling violated. This one was not her fault, unless it counted that her very existence, and Jeffrey’s consequent employment, resulted in his possession by bodiless Irishmen.

  Anne took another sip of her drink, hearing the ice rattle in the nearly empty glass. She sighed, and made a mental note to ask for the next one in a Big Girl Glass. A big: I was attacked by a mysterious monster, I’ve pissed off all three of the men in my life, and I still have a splitt
ing headache glass. She looked at the ceiling, wishing she had thought to bring her notepad with her. Maybe if she wrote everything down it would all make more sense.

  “Can I get you another?”

  The question did not come from the bartender, but rather from Anne’s right. A man in his mid-to-late thirties sat on the barstool beside Anne. He was tall and broad-chested; his unkempt fair hair in stark contrast to his well-tailored suit. He had a blond soul patch below his full lips, and he smiled at her with brilliantly white teeth. Anne found something about his demeanor very familiar and strangely arresting. It only took her a moment to identify the power that radiated from his taut body.

  He was an Angelus.

  “Can I buy you another, Anne?” he asked again.

  Anne studied the stranger.

  “Do I know you?”

  The man motioned to the bartender, ordering vodka for Anne and bourbon on the rocks for himself. He slipped two fingers in the neck of his shirt and pulled at the collar, as if annoyed by the grip it had on his throat.

  “Yes and no. You’re familiar with my work, and I’m familiar with yours. My name’s Leo.”

  Anne turned to face the man more fully. For all she knew, he could be the Perfidian who left a pile of bodies at the Brice House. He could be the creature who attacked her in the alley. If Con’s theory was right, maybe Leo knew how to shape shift into a monster.

  Leo gently placed his hand on hers and pushed energy towards her, much as Michael had after the attack. Anne’s body surged with a warm, tingly feeling; it made her uncomfortable, with the memory of her intimate moment on the roof with Michael still fresh in her mind. She felt herself blush and pulled her hand away from his.

  The man laughed.

  “I wish I always inspired that reaction in women.”

  “I imagine you do.”

  “True,” said Leo, smirking. “But I don’t meet a lot of women like you.”

  “You mean like this?” Anne asked, putting her hand onto Leo’s and gently siphoning his power. She wanted to see if his energy had the sick feeling of her attacker in the alley. It did not. Leo’s power was extraordinary and intoxicating, confirming for Anne that Leo was an Arch Angel like Michael.