I slammed the car door and buckled myself into the passenger seat while Will stared straight ahead.
“You going to be okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine. It’s Kale I’m worried about.” I clapped my palm to my forehead. “That’s right. Can you swing by the diner on the way home? We left the UDA files there.”
Will double-parked in front of the diner and I jumped out, a cold mass of nerves pulsing in my gut. I tried to maintain tunnel vision and avoid the spot where Kale went down, but I had the nagging need to look. The intersection buzzed with dull regularity as a Muni bus chugged by, followed by a Subaru packed with tourists who stared wide-eyed and openmouthed, foreheads and palms pressed against the glass. I sighed: nothing, no clues, no slow-moving car plastered with bumper stickers saying MY HONOR STUDENT RAN OVER YOUR FRIEND IN THE STREET. I had my hand on the door to the Fog City Diner, when I took one last glance back to where Will sat in the car, fiddling with the stereo. He bent low enough for me to notice a snatch of red hair on the other side of the street, a midcalf-brushing trench coat.
My heart thumped into my throat. Despite the moist, biting fog, my entire body broke out into a hot sweat. I spun on my heel and zigzagged through traffic, across the street, catching the door to Java Script as it swung closed behind the red-haired man. Vaguely I heard Will’s English accent cutting through the sounds of traffic. Vaguely I heard his car door slam shut, him telling me to come back.
Java Script was warm inside and the heady smell of roasted coffee beans stung my nose. I zipped past a display of hardback best sellers and “Java Script Recommends” titles. I was looking frantically for the red-haired man.
“Hey, welcome to Java Script.” A teenaged girl wearing a red apron grinned at me. “Is there something I can help you find?”
“Did you just see a man in a trench coat come in here? He had red hair like mine.” I pulled a lock of my own hair to demonstrate the color. “And he would have looked”—I swallowed bitter saliva—“a little like me, too.”
The girl shrugged. “Just now? The only person who came in here just now was you.” She smiled and her metal braces glinted in the harsh fluorescent lights. “It’s been a superslow day. But do you want me to leave a message in case someone comes in?”
The tinkling bells over the door did their thing and Will stepped inside, obviously irate. “What happened to picking something up at the diner? Next thing I know, you’re sprinting through traffic.”
I grabbed Will by the elbow and led him to a stack of James Patterson’s
“Who?”
I cut my eyes, left and right, then leaned in. “My father.”
Will stepped back, eyebrows raised. “Suddenly dear old dad pops back on the scene and stops in for a read?”
I ran a hand through my hair. “I know he’s here. At least I think he’s here.” I gripped at my chest. “I just kind of feel it.” Bat wings fluttered in my stomach. “Do you think maybe he misses me?”
Will offered me a sympathetic—if apologetic—smile. “I’m sure any father would miss a daughter like you.”
I felt a weird, unnerving sense of glee hearing that my father might miss me. That glee was only slightly doused with the unwelcome knowledge that dear old dad raked in souls by the bucketful and offered a fiery, brimstony afterlife, once all their cards were punched.
I looked over both shoulders. “Maybe he isn’t looking for me. But if I’m wrong, why did you come after me? Did you come in here because you sensed I was in danger? Was your Guardian Spidey sense tingling?”
“No. My charge almost made herself into a hood ornament two hours after her friend became a hood ornament in the same intersection.”
I blew out a sigh. “I’m just going to take a quick walk through the stacks and see if he’s here.”
“You really think ole Satan is going to be strolling through the stacks? I just kind of think, as you know, the ruler of hell, he’d have someone to pick up books for him. Or he’d Amazon it.”
“I don’t know. Just—”
“There’s a reading going on tomorrow afternoon.” The red-aproned girl walked up and shoved a flyer in each of our hands. “You guys should come. It’s Harley Cavanaugh, the author of
“Thanks,” I said, stuffing the flyer in my purse. I put my palms on Will’s firm chest. “Give me two minutes. I just want to see if he’s here. I just need to know if—if it’s happening again.”
I spun on my heel and beelined toward the cozy-mystery section before Will could answer, before Will could say something artificially reassuring about keeping me safe and hiding my secret—as the angels liked to say—“in plain sight.” I wound my way through the stacks, surprising a couple of teenagers making out in the gardening section and then running into an older man in military history. None of them were Lucas Szabo—the man who was my father, the man who left me four days after I was born.
The man who might very well be the devil.
It wasn’t until recently that I found out that my family tree was “rooted in hell,” as Nina liked to say. My mother, a seer and a woman who so hated her supernatural gift that she searched her entire life for a piece of normalcy, met my father, Lucas Szabo, at the University of San Francisco, where he worked teaching courses in legend and mythology. He wore cardigans and smoked a pipe and carried a leather briefcase. By all accounts he was a normal man. My mother fell deeply in love. By the time I came around, they were living in a walk-up apartment in the Hayes Valley and eating Campbell’s soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. There were no vampire roommates or unexpected drop-ins by pixies and fairies. They brought me home—drooling and pink, I suspect—and slept with me as I cooed in a bassinet at the end of the bed.
Four days later my mother came home from the market to find the apartment empty, my father’s closet cleaned out, and me, crying through the slats in my crib. My mother took me home to my grandmother and we settled there together.
When I was in elementary school, my grandmother told me that my mother died from a broken heart, pining for my father. I had chalked it up to the Lawson hankering for all things deep fried and chocolate dipped.
It wasn’t until last year that I learned the sinister circumstances of my mother’s death.
It wasn’t until last year that I learned when my mother hanged herself, I was there.
Chapter Nine
“Well?” Will asked as he came up on my shoulder.
“Well, nothing,” I said, backing out of the military-history book aisle. I leaned against a stack of Harley Cavanaugh’s books and rubbed small circles on my temples with my index fingers. “He’s not here.”
I felt Will slouch next to me. He laced his fingers through my hair and gently raked through the curls. The movement sent a ticklish prickle down my spine. “Don’t worry, love. It was probably just the old bloke that you saw there.”
“It wasn’t, Will. Believe me, I wish it were. I don’t ... I’m afraid, what if the hallucinations are starting again?”
Will turned to stare me full in the face. “The hallucinations were sent from Ophelia, and she’s dead now.”
“I know.” I leaned in so our foreheads were almost touching. “But what if there is another angel? Alex said they might keep coming.”
“I’m your Guardian and I haven’t heard anything or seen anything.” He shrugged. “Nothing’s come over the dispatch.”
I blinked. “There’s some sort of Guardian dispatch?”
Will smiled. “No. Isn’t it possible that you just thought you saw something?”
I blew out a sigh and stared at the toes of my shoes on the industrial-grade carpet. “I guess. I just have this feeling... .”
“You feel like you’re missing something?”
