Immortal City

at the party that night— Can’t wait for your star. Was Sierra and Steven’s jealousy so great that it would lead them to something like. . this? The look in her eyes had been dark and unblinking. But dark enough for murder?

“Jacks, this is more complicated than you could imagine,” Mark said.

The Archangel appraised his stepson. “I know all of this might not seem fair, but it’s part of the sacrifice that is asked of us,” he said.

Slowly, Mark sat next to Jacks again and let out a long breath.

“This is your Commissioning week, Jackson. I want you to think about your duty as a Guardian. Think about the Protection’s life you will be holding in your hands. Think about that. It will be your responsibility to make sure they come home to their families each night. So their children can have a parent. So their parents can have a child. So their siblings can have a brother or a sister.”

Mark put a firm hand on Jacks’s shoulder. “This is not about you anymore, Jackson. It’s about the Protections we serve. It’s about the duty we are all called to as Angels and as Guardians, and I will not have you mock that. I will not have you mock your duty, Jackson.”

Jacks stood up swiftly, irritated.

“You don’t have to lecture me about duty, Mark.”

In an instant, Mark had risen off the bed in front of Jacks, throwing him back across the room.

“Really? Then can you please tell me why I am seeing pictures of my stepson messing around with trash like that girl? Some human girl?”

Jacks steadied himself against the wall.

Mark’s tone was ferocious, echoing around the room.

“What were you thinking, Jacks? What were you thinking?” Mark spit out. “Do you think all this was coincid-ence, Jacks, all your media coverage, the success, the fame? Do you think we’ll just stand by and let you throw it away, that we’ll have groomed you for nothing, that we don’t need you to stand as a shining example against our enemies, who are growing every day? Do you? ” The walls almost shook with his furious tone.

Jackson and his stepfather stood mere inches from each other, eye to eye. Neither blinked. After a few moments the heave of Mark’s chest quieted. He began composing himself. Jacks turned away, taking in the weight of Mark’s words. He knew it was true.

“Mark, I’m sorry, I wasn’t—” Jacks said tiredly. “It’s over.”

Mark looked at his stepson. The rage was gone from his eyes now; only the disappointment remained.

“I’ll talk to Darcy in the morning; we’ll take care of it.

Try to get it killed by the Commissioning ceremony tomorrow night.”

Jacks nodded.

“You embarrassed yourself tonight, Jackson,” he said.

“Do yourself a favor and never, never do that again. Have I made myself clear?”

“Yes,” Jacks said.

Mark walked to the doorway.

“Very soon you’re going to be a Guardian Angel. At least try to act like one.” Mark paused for a moment on the threshold. Jacks looked at his stepfather, lit from the track lighting above him. There was something off about his blazer, which was normally so crisp and clean, now rumpled and thrown over his arm. It was stained. A red splotch. Like blood.

Before Jacks could even register what he was seeing, Mark closed the door with a slam. Waiting until he heard his stepfather’s footsteps fade down the hall, Jacks leapt up from his bed and went to where Mark had stopped. He leaned down and looked at where the Archangel had been standing, but there was no sign of anything. He checked the comforter on the bed, where Mark had been sitting. Nothing there, either. Jacks shook his head. It’d been a late night — he must have been imagining things.

But he hadn’t imagined the look in Maddy’s eyes when she told him she wanted nothing to do with him.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“Last call,” the man said, wiping dry another pint glass from behind the bar.

A solitary figure sitting at the bar in an overcoat nodded. Dust hung heavy in the dark air. The bartender picked up a broom and began sweeping.

Sylvester slowly twirled the remaining sliver of ice in the glass of whiskey he’d been nursing for the past thirty minutes. The dark bar was almost empty. It had been an Angel City institution for decades, with its dark wood, deep maroon-colored booths, and battered stools. Archangels had sat in those booths in years past, wheeling and dealing, and framed pictures of famous Guardians who used to be regulars in the forties and fifties hung dusty above the mirror of the bar.

The detective hadn’t been there in years. But he’d needed to think. The encounter with Mark had left him unsettled. Was the Archangel hiding something? Or someone? Sylvester’s mind struggled to put the pieces together. In bringing up Sylvester’s punishment, his expulsion from the Angels, Mark had hit a nerve the detective had long since tried to bury. Sometimes he swore he could still feel his wings. Phantom limbs. Better not to dwell on these things. Think of the case at hand, not time long passed, he told himself.

It was going to rain. Sylvester felt it in his back. Pressure was in the air.

Why would someone — or maybe some thing—be taking justice on these Angels? What had Godson or Templeton done, or was the reason for the murders just the order of their stars? Did the HDF have the know-how to recruit an unhappy Angel to their side? There had to be a part he was missing. Sylvester turned the facts over and over in his mind. Troublingly, his thoughts kept moving to the Archangels themselves. Could the Archangels somehow be cleaning out enemies from within the ranks, and if so, would Mark even be aware of it? It could go all the way to the Council. The more he thought about it, the more he began to question Mark’s motives. He’d seemed evasive, and not too surprised when he was told his stepson’s star was next. The detective’s head swirled with possibilities, leads, dead ends. A file ten inches thick was waiting for him on the passenger seat of his cruiser. A peek into the dank underbelly of the Immortal City.

He tipped back the glass and took another sip of his drink. The detective was woozy, but not from the booze. He needed some sleep.

The TV above the bar was tuned to a news channel, but of course they were talking about Angels. A group of talking heads was on a debate-type show. On-screen was the graphic Angels: Whose Side Are They On?

“Can you turn that up?” Sylvester asked, motioning to the TV.

The bartender picked up the remote, bumping the volume up a few notches. “You want the check too?” he asked, hopefully. The handful of final other customers was clearing out. Sylvester nodded.

A man with a goatee and glasses was speaking to the two other experts on the show: “So what you have here, what you have is total uncooperation on the part of the Angels, Teri. We have no idea how these guys work. They just show up and do a save for the right price. There’s no transparency, no accountability—”

“But the fact is they’re saving lives, Will. Pure and simple. Do the math,” Teri, a woman in a power suit with short-cropped brown hair, interrupted the goateed man.

“I’ve done the math, Teri, and the fact is that the Angels only save a few, while the vast majority of humanity is left out in the cold,” Will responded, his face getting slightly red. “And now with these confirmed Angel deaths happening in what’s being called serial killer murders, which we’ve learned about just minutes ago, and the media hysteria that will certainly come from them, we have absolutely no idea what’s going on. The Angels are acting as if everything is just business as usual.”

Sylvester sat up straight. The murders had gone public. The Angels couldn’t keep everyone in the dark forever.

The story was too explosive.

None of the handful of other customers in the bar seemed to pay much mind. They went there at that hour to try to escape the Immortal City’s woes, not pay attention to them.