Under Attack

Nina smiled and nodded, then followed me out the office door.

“You know, a French twist would really offset the one-shoulder neckline of that dress... .”

“Nina!” I moaned.

“Sorry!”

She shut the door with a click behind her.

We crossed the bridge in near silence, but once our tires hit the Marin side, I was fairly sure the thunderous beat of my heart was filling the car.

“There’s nothing to be nervous about,” Nina said, not taking her eyes off the road. “Everything is going to be fine.”

“Thanks,” I said, grateful, but unconvinced. “If I had known he lived just a few miles away ...”

“You don’t know how long he’s lived here. He could have just moved into the area.”

“Or he could have been here all along.”

“Then he’s a huge deadbeat bastard. It’s not nice, but it’s not rare.”

I blew out a sigh, stroked the smooth fabric of my rhinestone-studded breaking-and-entering gloves. “Turn here,” I said.

Nina glided her car down a tree-lined street. The moonless darkness was punctuated by the occasional weak streetlight. We rolled slowly down the street until we found number seventy-one, a well kept but otherwise nondescript house set way off from the street at the arc of a cul-de-sac.

“Here it is.” Nina said.

“Yeah, here it is.”

We parked across the street, then ducked our way to the front of my father’s house, positioning ourselves in a thick bank of rosebushes. We hunched low against the moist dirt, our elegant gloves protecting us from the rosebushes’ thorns.

“See?” Nina said happily. “Better than latex.”

I squinted, frowned in the darkness. “Binoculars. I should have brought binoculars.”

“One step ahead of you,” Nina said as she leaned forward, her face pressed up against a pair of bejeweled opera glasses.

“See anything?”

“Not really.” She glared down at the long-stemmed binoculars. “These aren’t the best for this kind of thing.”

“Imagine that,” I said, my legs aching from my fifteen-minute squat. “This was a bad idea. I don’t think we’re going to find anything.”

“Shh!” Nina’s held out her hand, gloved fingers splayed. “What was that?”

“What was what?” I asked, relenting and flopping down on my butt in the flower garden. “I’ve got human hearing, remember?”

But then I heard it, too. A gentle rustling in the bushes to the left of us.

Nina sniffed at the air, her eyebrows raised. She furrowed her brow, then frowned, sniffing again. “Alex? Is that you?”

“It’s cool and disconcerting that you can do that.”

The bushes rustled again and Alex poked his head out, his skin translucent in the pale moonlight.

“Alex?” I asked.

He had a pair of binoculars—real binoculars—in one hand and was tastefully dressed in black cargo pants, black combat-style boots, and a yummy, formfitting long-sleeved henley shirt. He grinned when he saw me. “I guess we both had the same idea here. Of course, my tux was at the cleaners.”

“Very funny,” I scoffed. “You should be glad I don’t have a closet full of breaking-and-entering attire.”

“You really shouldn’t be here,” Nina said, pointing at Alex. “I could smell you from a mile away.”

“You shouldn’t be here, either.” Alex was looking at Nina but talking to me.

“Vampires don’t have a smell. You have a smell.”

“Sophie has a smell,” Alex said.

“Sophie is right here and not too crazy about people discussing her smell,” I said.

The opening of the garage door silenced our smell discussion. “Look!” Nina hissed. “Who’s that?”

I snatched her opera glasses and peered down at the garage, the yellow glow from the overhead light illuminating my father. My stomach dropped. It was him; it was the man I had seen on the corner on my way to Loco Legs, the man I had seen in a picture that my grandmother kept taped to the back of a picture frame.

It angered me to see him flipping his car keys in his palm. It roiled my blood to see him glide effortlessly to his car, to back out and drive away. Somehow, I had hoped that things were difficult for him. That going out to look for me, to find me, would be impossible due to paralysis or a lame leg or a rattletrap car. But my father was doing fine, gliding down the street in a midnight blue and perfectly well-running Audi.

“We need to get inside his house,” I said.

“We do?” Nina asked.

“Sophie’s right. We’re not going to find out anything out here. Nina, you stand watch, Sophie and I will go in.”

Nina stood up, put her cashmere-covered hands on her hips. “Why do I have to stand watch?”

“Would you rather I asked you to stand smell?”

She stomped out of the bushes and to the curb. “Fine. But I’m smelling from the car.”

Alex turned to me. “Are you ready?”

“For breaking and entering?”

Alex’s gaze was solid.

“I’m ready,” I said.

Alex and I picked our way across the sloping grass, being careful to stay in the shadows. Halfway down, a car drove by and Alex reached behind him, his hand grabbing mine, and we tucked behind a Japanese maple.

It may have been my adrenaline or my hormones on high alert, but the feel of his hand on mine was heavenly, the gentle brushing of our knees while we crouched, sweet.

“Okay,” he whispered, “we’re safe.”

We stood up, but Alex didn’t let go of my hand.

“So,” I said when we had made it to the front porch, “do you have some sort of magically angelic way of getting through locked doors?”

“Yep.” Alex dug in his pocket, revealed a long, skinny tool, and pushed it into the door lock. After a half- second jiggle we heard the lock click and give, and he pushed the door open, slipping the shim into his pocket.

I put my hands on my hips. “Alex Grace, what would God say?”

Alex rolled his eyes and ushered me into the dark foyer.

I went to turn on the light, but Alex stopped me. “Someone might notice it.”

“How are we supposed to see anything?” I asked.

“With my glowing angelic orb.”

“You have one of those?”

“In your world, it’s called a flashlight. Now come on.” Alex clicked on his flashlight and kept the beam low. We edged around the furniture in Szabo’s living room and made our way to the bookcases that lined one wall.

“Look for anything that has to do with the Vessel. We need to know what he knows about ... it.”

I fingered the spine of classics (Moby Dick, Gulliver’s Travels) and figured my dad must have been quite the traveler from his collection of Let’s Go! guides. I passed over the usual stock of New York Times bestsellers and John Grisham novels, then stopped on one book—Stroham’s Guide to Angels. Beside that, Contacting Angels and Communicating After Death.

“I haven’t found anything about the Vessel, but he sure is into angels.”

“Makes sense,” Alex said, turning to me and showing the carved ivory angel figurine he held in his hand.

I turned back to the bookshelf and bumped a small volume that stuck out from the pack. It was simply titled Dark Angels.

I held the book up. “Maybe he was looking for you, too.” I thumbed through the book. “It’s all about fallen angels. It was probably for work though; my grandmother did say he was a professor of mythological studies at one