apartment to where Squire was waiting.
“Maybe it’s the stink,” Francis said, gripping the corpse’s legs as he stepped through the fluttering passage. “Stink has to weigh something, right?”
Montagin came through and they prepared to lay the body down.
“Got any tarps or trash bags handy?” Francis asked, remembering how the body had leaked.
“Got a few
“Yeah, that’ll do,” Francis said.
The hobgoblin shot into the kitchen, returned with a small stack of newspapers, and began to lay them on the floor.
“Got it,” he said as he finished.
Francis had begun to position himself to lower the bottom half of the dead Aszrus down, when Montagin released his end, the angel general’s skull sounding like a dropped bowling ball as it bounced off the hardwood floor beneath the newspaper.
Francis just glared at the angel.
“What?” Montagin protested. “It isn’t like he’s going to feel it.”
He was about to wipe his hands on his pants when he thought better of it.
“I need to wash my hands,” the fussy angel proclaimed.
“Go right ahead,” Squire told him. “But I’m fresh out of lavender bath soaps.”
Montagin fixed the hobgoblin in a withering stare.
Squire looked right back at him, refusing to back down.
Francis knew that he liked the little guy for a reason.
Montagin left the scene disgusted as he went in search of a sink to wash his hands.
“Don’t forget to lift the seat, Mary,” Squire grumbled beneath his breath as the angel passed.
The passage Francis had cut from his apartment to here healed shut noisily with a sucking sound, leaving nothing behind to show that the tear had ever been there.
“Now what?” Francis asked.
“Now we get him someplace where it won’t matter if he stinks to high fucking hell.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Francis agreed.
Squire rubbed his stubby hands together. “First off, we need a nice piece of shadow.”
The hobgoblin was in the process of moving his sparse furniture around, so that the sun coming in from the unshaded window provided them with the largest area of shadow that they could have, when the explosion caused the apartment to shake.
“What the fuck?” Squire cried out.
Francis was already on the move, pistol in his hand as he left the living room, in pursuit of the commotion going on down the hallway in the first bedroom.
He wasn’t sure what he expected to see, and was relieved that it was only Montagin, his chest burning from where he had been struck. He rose to his feet, wings spread.
“You dare use your filthy magick upon me!” the angel bellowed, facing off against an unknown assailant in the bedroom.
A blast of crackling energy whipped out, striking where the angel had just been standing. He leapt above the latest assault, propelling himself into the bedroom with a thrust of his wings.
Francis aimed his pistol from the doorway, the racket of battle rising up from the skirmish unfolding before him.
“For the love of Christ,” he cried, slipping away his gun. “Break it up you two!”
He entered the room, careful to avoid magickal spells that were missing their intended target and striking nearby walls. If this kept up he could see some pretty hefty repair work in his building’s future.
“Knock it off!” the former Guardian angel screamed again as he watched Montagin and the sorcerer, Angus Heath, thrashing about on the floor of the bedroom.
There was a flash of divine fire, and Francis knew that things were about to get even more serious as he dove forward to grab Montagin by the shoulder, hauling him backward with a show of inhuman strength.
“Get your filthy hands off of me,” the angel said with a snarl, turning a flaming hand toward Francis.
The gun was shoved up underneath Montagin’s nose.
“I will turn the top of your head into a fucking Frisbee,” Francis snarled.
A blast of magickal energy struck Montagin from behind, causing him to cry out. He fell to the ground, his body crackling in a magickal corona.
“Oh, don’t make me threaten you, too,” Francis said, aiming his gun at Heath.
“He attacked me,” Heath proclaimed, swaying unsteadily on stumpy bare feet.
“I used the bathroom to wash my hands,” Montagin said, rising to his knees, his wings slowly fanning away the excess magickal power that had engulfed him.
“I didn’t know who you were,” Heath explained.
“Montagin, Angus Heath,” Francis said. “Angus Heath, Montagin. We all BFFs now?”
Squire appeared in the doorway. “Is it safe?” the hobgoblin asked.
“Yeah, everything’s just hunky-dory,” Francis said, putting his gun away. “Think we might be able to—”
The building shook.
“It wasn’t me,” Heath immediately responded, covering his ass.
Montagin was staring at Francis. Clearly the angel felt it, too—that certain feeling in the air when
“What the fuck now?” Squire grumbled.
“Angels,” Francis said, already on his way from the room. “We’ve just been fucking invaded.”
Constantin Malatesta wore two masks.
The woman who had brought him to the small apartment, off a winding hall away from the main lobby, stood above him as he sat, her eyes fixed upon him hungrily.
“Can I get you anything?” she asked. She’d told him that her name was Natalia, and that she had heard things about him.
Things that she wanted to experience for herself.
He didn’t know what to do; any slight deviation in his concentration could cause the spell that allowed him to masquerade as the angel general to slip, and where would he—and Remy Chandler for that matter—be then?
“A drink? Drugs? Something stronger?” Natalia asked. She had already taken his goblet and was holding it in her hands, suggestively running them along the shaft of the golden cup.
Malatesta didn’t even want to look at her, for it made his thoughts go places that he would rather they not —for the sake of the glamour spell that he wore, as well as the mask of sanity that had been his for these many years, since being indoctrinated into the ways of the Keepers.
Two masks that could potentially fall away if . . .
Natalia tossed the goblet aside and dropped to her knees in front of him.
“Or we could just begin with this,” she suggested, leaning into him, resting her arms on his legs as he sat. One of her hands began to wander in the direction of his crotch.
Panic—sheer, electric panic—shot through him.
Malatesta suddenly stood, nearly knocking the woman over.
Natalia appeared shocked, but then began to laugh.
“I know Morgan is your usual, but there’s no need to be shy,” she told him with a throaty chuckle.
Not knowing what to do, he fixed his gaze upon the golden goblet lying there, and snatched it up from the floor.
“I think I will have something to drink,” he said, just to have something to say, doing everything in his power to maintain his masquerade.
“You go right ahead,” she told him. “We’ll have many hours to get used to one another . . . many hours to play.”
He felt his heart begin to hammer in his chest as he approached the bar cabinet in the corner of the room. Letting his eyes wander over the multitude of bottles, he settled on what he thought was whiskey, and poured
