Strange Angels

Lighten up? I stared at him like he was crazy before getting the cheese and butter out of the fridge. I tied him down and nearly shot him, and he’s telling me to “lighten up”?

The grin widened, his eyes very bright green now, no hazel tint left. He shook his hair down over his face and puckered his lips, making kissing noises. That strange heat crawled up my cheeks again. It got to me and I laughed, with the butter in one hand and the cheese in the other. We had bread in the freezer—it probably would have frozen on the counter too. That’s a good way to keep it fresh down South, especially if you eat a lot of toast. Or grilled cheese.

“That’s better.” He leaned against the counter, wrapping himself more securely in the quilt. “We’re in the same boat, you know. I don’t have anyone either. Not anyone I can call or anything. I’ve been on my own since I was twelve.”

Great. What am I supposed to say to that? I got the frying pan out. He didn’t mention the plywood and taped-down blankets over the back door. I didn’t mention the closing and healing flesh on his shoulder. We were mostly silent, and the wind moaned against the corners of the house.

But I opened up a couple cans of tomato soup and dumped them in a pot, and I didn’t feel quite so lonely. Having someone in the house—someone who wasn’t going to leave just yet—helped. I even poured him a glass of milk.

Call me domestic.

CHAPTER 15

“Holy shit.” Graves peered into the ammo crate. “Jesus. Was your dad a survivalist?”

He was helping me clean up the living room. He didn’t ask about the bullet holes in the wall, or about the faint, horrible smell of rotting zombie. He also didn’t ask about the clothes he’d seen me scoop carefully up off the floor and set to soaking in the washing machine. Dad’s clothes were torn up and stinky, all his weapons and his billfold missing, along with Mom’s locket on its supple silver chain.

I didn’t want to think about that.

Snow whirled down thick and steady outside, each flake a muffled erasure of the world. The radio said some people had lost power, but not us. Not yet. I was glad about that—even with the duct-taped blankets the kitchen was chilly, the heater working overtime until I scrounged up more blankets and another two pieces of plywood to create a baffle. It worked pretty well, actually. Especially since I’d braced the door to the porch.

I opened up the fire-safe box, sure I’d find what I was after. After a bit of digging through papers—birth certificates for both of us, my immunization records, a fat file of records from each school I’d attended—I found the ragged red address book, duct tape clinging to its vinyl cover. Dad’s kill book would be in the truck, but contacts were always kept separate.

Okay, Dad. Let’s see who can get me out of this, since you’ve ended up a stain on the living- room rug. A stain I should vacuum up, by the way. In a fresh bag so I can keep it.

A hot bolt of nausea scored through me. That was no way to think about my dead father, was it? But it was either find something snarky to say or start crying, and if I started sniveling now, I might never stop.

Dad hated sniveling. “Bingo,” I muttered.

“I mean, what do you use all this stuff for?” Graves continued. I’d given him a pair of Dad’s sweats, but he’d turned down my offer of a Peter Frampton T-shirt. So his narrow back was pale and goose pimpled despite the heater. I could have found him something else to wear, but he made such a big deal over the Frampton I decided he could go shirtless if he was going to be picky. I mean, it’s not like it was David Cassidy or something.

I kept trying not to look at his bare skin, though. It made me feel weird. “Hunting.” I closed the top of the safe box, made sure it was shut and locked down. “Get out of there, that’s live ammo.”

He was still poking around. “This isn’t really a grenade, is it?”

“Of course it’s real. You won’t clean out a roach-spirit nest with a fake grenade. Get out of there, you’re not trained.”

“Did your dad teach you how to use this stuff?”

“Most of it. He told me to leave the AK-47 alone, though.” I paged through the address book, deciphering Dad’s scrawl. Most of the numbers were down South, with a smattering in California and up around Maine. Nothing near the freaking Dakotas. I even recognized some of them—the hunter in Carmel who surfed almost every day unless he was too injured from clearing out sucker holes with a team of hard-faced mercenaries; the women who lived out on the back bayou miles away from anywhere and kept the gator spirits pacified and cleared out; August in New York who swore in gutter Polish when he drank with Dad and could make a thin shining yellow flame spring from the tip of his index finger if he was in the right mood.

Graves almost choked. “You have an AK-47?”

And a flamethrower, but that’s in the truck. “Only for emergencies.” I found a scrap of paper tucked three-quarters of the way back with a number in our new area code. Nothing else. No name, no inked cross that meant it was a safe number for me to dial, no ident info.

Great. Who would take a plane ride out here just to make me feel better? I’d have to explain what happened to Dad, too. Or as much as I knew about what happened to him. Which wasn’t much. But still.

The way my stomach turned over at the thought threatened to push out every bit of grilled cheese I’d eaten. It was my fault; I hadn’t told him about the owl. “Jesus,” I whispered, staring down at the number. It was on the back of a receipt from an occult shop in Miami, the one where Dad had found a glassy shard of obsidian good for taking down chupacabras. He’d FedExed it out to Tijuana for Juan-Raoul de la Hoya-Smith.

The goatsuckers were really bad around Tijuana. Juan-Raoul said it was the heat and the tamales.

Dad had stayed closeted with the dreadlocked, scary-looking owner of that shop for a good two hours after it closed, while I wandered around looking at things and getting hungrier and hungrier. When he’d reappeared, his face had been stony-set and white, and he’d stayed up drinking in our hotel room all that night. I’d ordered room service and watched old cartoons until I fell asleep.

Now I wondered if Dad had gotten this phone number there. I wondered if it was safe—the inked cross meant “safe”; the slashed circle meant “unsafe except in an emergency”; and no sign could mean anything.

It was Dad’s handwriting, no doubt about it. Nobody else had access to the book, and there was his way of making a 9 from the bottom with a single line. I wondered whose number it was.

I was going to have to go to a pay phone and find out. It was the only number in this area, but it didn’t have a mark next to it. It wasn’t like Dad to forget a thing like marking a safe contact.

It wasn’t like him at all. But he hadn’t been himself since that shop with the cottonmouths hitting the glass with hard, padded sounds, making that horrible ratcheting noise. I looked up at the living-room window. The blizzard wind made a low chuckling sound, mocking me.

“Dru? You okay?” Graves was suddenly there. I hadn’t seen him moving as I stared at the window, lost in thought.

Woolgathering, Gran would have called it. As in, Don’t woolgather when they’s work to be done, Dru. Go milk the goats and look’n fer eggs, and when you come back I’ll teach’n you how to use a pendulum. Won’t that be fun?

Only with her thick Appalachian accent, it sounded slow as molasses inside my head. I could get out the pendulum now, but it wouldn’t be any good when I was wishing and hoping too hard. Sometimes things like pendulums or tarot cards will just tell you what you want to hear, not the truth. Gran always said you should see it for yourself instead of using “crutches,” but the crutches were good when you didn’t have time to put yourself in a trance or wait for a dream or omen.

“I’m fine.” I shook the idea away and copied the number on a plain piece of anonymous scrap paper, then shoved it in my pocket. The receipt was Evidence, and we Minimized Evidence, so it went back in the book. The contacts went back into the fireproof box, and I looked around the living room. There was nothing to do for the time being while we were snowed in, so I searched for something to say to get the conversation off me. “You can’t go