Angel Fever

bullet wound gaped in his toned bicep. Willow stood tensely beside him. Claudia, a recruit who’d been training to be a paramedic – the closest thing to a doctor they had – was there; Alex winced as she examined his wound.

“You were lucky – it looks like a clean, through-and-through shot,” she said. “I don’t think you’ve damaged the bone.”

Seb gave the injury only cursory notice; what had hit him the second he walked in was the mood. Both Willow and Alex were still reeling from something that had nothing to do with however Alex had gotten shot.

The foreboding Seb had felt for days intensified. “What’s happened?” he demanded.

Alex gave a thin smile. “Might have known you’d show up.” As Claudia stepped away to rummage through the supply closet, he rubbed his temples and said in a low voice, “I’ll be announcing it to the others soon. The angels aren’t linked any more.”

At first Seb thought he hadn’t heard right. “What?”

Willow held out her hand. “Here,” she said quietly. She wasn’t offering comfort, she was offering information. Seb took Willow’s hand, trying to ignore the feel of it in his, and closed his eyes.

A rent in the sky – angels pouring in – an ominous sense of separateness. For an added kick in the teeth, he also saw how Alex had gotten shot: felt Willow’s panic, her immense love for him.

Finally Seb let go. He opened his mouth to speak, but there were no words. Willow touched his shoulder, her eyes tormented. “I know,” she said.

Maybe she did; it didn’t help. Seb slumped into a chair, watching distantly as Claudia gave Alex a local anaesthetic and cleaned his injury, trimming away the mangled flesh of his exit wound. As she started stitching him up, all Seb could see was a street scene in Mexico City.

It had been Revolution Day: there’d been a mariachi band, dancing in the street – and an angel cruising overhead. Seb had been watching from the balcony of his hostel when he’d seen the angel choose a street girl to feed from and, without thinking, he’d sent his own angel flying out to protect her.

Only through the sheerest of luck had he managed to destroy the angel and not be killed himself. But he’d done it. The girl had been saved – and Seb left stunned by his own willingness to risk his life.

He’d thought of her often since then: her thin face and brown eyes. Had she survived or been killed in the quakes that brought down Mexico City? He hoped she’d lived. Madre mia, he hoped so much that she’d lived.

Saving her had been the seed that had changed him. After a lifetime of ambivalence about the angels, it had hit Seb hard: What they’re doing here is wrong. The knowledge that the AKs could really defeat them had kept him going for almost a year now, especially as the biggest disappointment of his life had unfolded: the realization that his half-angel girl would never want him.

Seb watched blindly as Claudia finished bandaging Alex’s arm. So now there were millions more angels here, and the only way to kill them was to shoot them one by one? There were ninety-nine AKs. Seb had never spent much time in school, but there was nothing wrong with his basic maths.

It’s over, he thought. It’s all over.

Claudia handed Alex two small cardboard boxes. “Antibiotics – twice a day, with food. The others are painkillers; I think you’re going to need them.”

Alex barely glanced at the medication. “Yeah, thanks. Can you get on the intercom and announce a meeting in the dining room in ten minutes?”

Claudia blinked. “Now? It’s the middle of the night.”

“Yes, now,” said Alex, massaging his forehead.

“Alex, you need to rest. Whatever you have to say can wait until—”

His voice was quiet but firm. “No. It can’t.”

Claudia opened her mouth, then took in his expression. Her reluctance clear, she left the room. A moment later, her voice came booming out: “Attention, everyone! Please come to the dining room for a meeting in ten minutes. Repeat, please come to the dining room—”

As the announcement continued, Willow hugged Alex’s waist; he put his good arm around her. “Do you want a painkiller?” she asked.

“Not yet.” Alex’s blue-grey eyes met Seb’s; the corner of his mouth lifted humourlessly. “Bet this is just the news you wanted to hear, huh?”

Without waiting for a response – which was good, since Seb had literally nothing to say – Alex let go of Willow and stretched across the table for his T-shirt. Then he seemed to remember. “Oh, great, it’s covered in blood.”

“I’ll get you another one.” Willow kissed him, then pitched the stained T-shirt into the trash and left the room. For once, Seb’s energy didn’t automatically follow after her.

Alex grimaced as he lowered himself off the table. “Don’t ever get shot – it hurts like hell,” he told Seb wearily. Going to the mirror above the sink, he peered at himself, then reached for a towel. He moistened it and started swabbing the blood from his face and chest.

“How?” said Seb finally. His voice was ragged. “How did the cabron do it?”

“Christ knows,” said Alex. “It was something to do with the gate – an energy blast when it opened. He did it with that, somehow.”

Alex went silent then; he wadded up the towel and threw it hard at the dirty linens hamper. “God damn it. How am I supposed to tell them this? What am I going to say?”

Seb couldn’t answer. Willow re-entered a moment later with a T-shirt; he watched Alex wince as she helped him into it. And for some reason, he thought about his father: the unknown angel, who for all Seb knew was still out there, feeding from unwary humans entranced by his beauty. Right now, the knowledge that someone – some thing – so closely related to him could be harming humanity felt like more than he could stand.

“You coming?” asked Alex from the doorway.

It took Seb a second to understand that Alex meant the meeting. He started to say no – he had no desire to hear the news a second time. Then he thought of Meghan, with her bright smile and joyous energy…and, to his faint surprise, realized that he wanted to be there for her even more than he wanted to return to his dorm and block out the world. He couldn’t let her hear this alone.

“Yes, I’m coming,” he said dully, and rose to his feet.

7

AS RAZIEL LEFT THE AUSTIN Eden hospital room, he closed the door gently; behind it there remained only silence. The room’s inhabitant was really quite formidable when it came to resisting his attempts to…well, encourage talking.

He gave a considering smile as he straightened his cuffs. The game had been fascinating for months now. The patient was a worthy opponent – so weak, yet so fiercely determined. Yes, he’d be quite sorry when the occupant of room 428 was transferred to Salt Lake Eden; he’d lose his perfect distraction.

And there was much he needed to be distracted from.

He strode moodily down the hallway, his reflection wavering in the polished floor. The Separation the week before had gone as planned – and as he’d suspected, the other angels had not been happy.

Of course, they’d all known that he’d been the one to prepare the gate between dimensions, by wielding the strong, pliable energy field of their own world – which, when harnessed, was capable of amazing things on both the ethereal and physical levels. It had always amazed Raziel that none of the other angels seemed to appreciate the sheer possibilities of this. The energy field was normally used only to create works of art or things of that ilk – and when its use affected them all, it had to be done by consensus.

Needless to say, Raziel had not bothered getting a consensus.

When the Separation occurred, he had been standing in the parking lot of the Denver Church of Angels, shielding his thoughts expertly from the hundred or so angels whose presence he hadn’t been able to avoid. None