I agreed with Carlos about Cowboy not getting snagged for a long time. In fact, it almost made me wonder if he was a plant. My jaw ticked and I forced the thought away. There was no way the facility and its overseers could have known I would make it out, or that I would attempt a breakout on that day. Hell, I hadn’t known until moments before. They would have stopped me if they’d known.
Thinking of them, my head went to Eligor and the feel of him in my mind. He’d unbound my abilities just in time, and while he had been the one to help cage me, he’d saved me too. But had it been Eligor? That sensation was almost like him, but different enough that I noticed it.
For just a moment, I saw him, and he looked back at me. Only he wasn’t the Eligor of before. This time he was a lanky, bespectacled college-looking guy. Fear was written all over his face. He shook his head, possibly as a warning, then was gone.
Fuck. They’d stuffed him in another body?
And we really were still connected. Could he keep them off me? Would he keep helping or would he end up turning on me too? Yeah, fuck was too weak a word for this.
“Sleeping Beauty!” Dinah cat-called with a whistle as Cowboy stirred. “Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey!”
Peter went right to teasing Cowboy about missing out on all the action, watching it all as a spectator. Cowboy mumbled something about a Magelore and a sheep on a dark night, and Peter howled with laughter, though I didn’t think it had been meant as a joke. Carlos smiled and shook his head, the fatherly figure in all this.
I put a hand over the assault weapon on my lap next to Dinah.
“Show me your smaller size.”
He shivered. “Say please.”
Dinah sighed. “Oh, don’t be a shit. Do it.”
“Please,” I said though I wanted to throw him out the window for being an ass.
The gun clicked as though there were dozens of hidden gears inside of him, more than those needed for the firing of bullets. The AK-47 effectively shrunk to a weapon that could be hidden under a coat. A miniature AK-47. Not as small as Dinah, but I could put him on my back with a coat over top.
“I can shoot longer distances better full-sized, but pretty much everything else is the same,” Diego said. “That work?”
“Good.” I urged Ruby off my lap, then checked the two guns for damage and used the refills I’d snagged from Carlos’s hidey-hole. After refilling the incendiary and smoke bomb rounds on Dinah, I flipped through the other ammo in the box. Most of it was simple stuff. Sedative rounds were new to me and could be useful. I poured the liquid into Diego’s barrel.
Yes, it was just that simple with the guns.
“Think we might be needing to knock people out instead of kill them?” he asked.
“If we go up against another abnormal working under the influence of the handlers, I’d at least try to knock them out,” I said, thinking of Easter. When I’d gotten that glimpse of Eligor, I thought I’d seen a flash of red hair behind him. It would not surprise me in the least if they used Easter to track us, and potentially kill me.
Peter cleared his throat. “Are we going to talk about what happened? With the angel wings and the crack that looked like it led straight to Hell and all the hands sucking him down, the smell of sulfur?”
My jaw ticked and I stared out the window, thinking. “I’m not sure what there is to say. You about summed it up. It confirms what I already believed—we are not dealing with abnormals.”
Carlos nodded slowly. “I’d thought you would be wrong, but it looks indeed as though we are dealing with a fallen angel or angels. The others were afraid when they saw their friend taken. And that you did it to him.”
I put a hand to my head, realizing that I had a pounding headache. Could be the drugs from dinner or withdrawal from the sedatives, but I suspected it was mostly from the power surge rocketing through me. My fingers tingled just thinking about it.
“Yeah, but what does it mean?” Peter tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “He couldn’t possibly have been an angel, not with that ugly shit he had going on.”
I wasn’t so sure. “Demons can make themselves look beautiful, and they usually do to fool the unwary and draw them into deals that can’t be broken. They come in all shapes and sizes—”
“Like Eligor,” Cowboy said. I nodded and went on. Because we weren’t dealing with demons, I was sure of it. “They don’t like to be seen as monstrous unless you’ve broken your end of a contract. That’s when the ugly comes out. But these three . . . they were monstrous from the start.” I frowned. “I don’t understand why shooting its own power back at it made it look angelic, much less why it was then pulled through the planes of existence into what, yes, Peter”—I looked at him—“was probably a glimpse into Hell. Or a hellish plane, however you want to look at it.”
Peter opened his mouth, flashing his fangs, and then shook his head. “But, wait, if you’re right and these are fallen angels, what are they doing getting sucked down into Hell?”
I had an idea, but I was hoping I was wrong. “We need to get to a church. The info I need isn’t going to be found in any database, book, or priest.”
Cowboy leaned through the gap between the two front seats. “A church?”
“A particular church,” I said quietly. “One that hosts a demon. And who better to tell us how to defeat a fallen angel than a demon?”
Cowboy’s jaw dropped and he stuttered. “Are you insane? After that, you want to talk to
