Angels of Darkness

“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?”