The vast attention I felt from below turned away and I almost slumped in relief.
“Holy shit!” Lydia said.
“It worked!” Mack exclaimed, earning himself the undivided attention of all of us. He shrugged. “I know how to draw it, and I’ve drawn it for Declan, but I wasn’t sure about Chris calling in the request.”
“Me either, Mack. Me either,” I said.
It took us the better part of a week and a half to train the readily available teams. The next groups would be coming in four nights, so we had some down time, and we all took advantage of it. Lydia disappeared, but Tanya mentioned Vermont, so I figured she was headed north for a booty call with Bruce Devany who, with Holly and, of course, Stacia, were all guarding Declan. Hosakawa locked himself in his quarters and meditated, the Elders all split in different directions to catch up on their respective global areas of responsibility, Nika checked into a local spa, and the Suttons took off for a bladesmith show in Pennsylvania.
Tanya and I spent our down time mainly with the twins, although her global business empire took some of her time too. On night three, I came back up to our apartment to help put the twins down for the day. First was bathtime, which with various floating and invisible children resulted in both parents soaked to the skin, then came storytime. When your children are born with essentially superpowers, storytime becomes a 3D interactive event. Tanya blames Declan to a degree, but as I pointed out, we begged him to teach them, and our circle of trust for watching the twins is a very, very small group. Beggers, choosers, as Lydia likes to say.
We gave up on the Three Little Pigs when it became apparent that Cora was rooting for the wolf, instead going with the Sorcerer’s Apprentice as a cautionary tale. I asked Declan about his own childhood and he indicated that all of his bedtime tales were cautionary up until he was five or six. His mother and aunt were not afraid to tell him some rather scary stories so long as they taught a lesson in self-conduct. For this reason, his childhood was filled with stories taken from cultures all around the planet. His aunt even gave us the names of various collections of Native American, European, Asian, and African stories. We hadn’t pulled the trigger on the scary ones yet, instead still working our way through Disney and some tame Brothers Grimm.
In our version, we used vampire powers, as a team, to animate a trio of brooms from the custodial closet on our floor. It was tricky work, but our bond helped immensely. The twins thought it fun, although our reviews didn’t meet our competition’s.
“Unky Dec’an make them fly,” Wulf noted, watching a broom from behind his mother.
“Uncle Declan is a witch who can make dirt run,” Tanya said, drily.
“Yup yup yup,” Cora said, clapping her hands. “So much dirt.”
We got a dispensation because they didn’t really want to hurt Mommy and Daddy’s feelings, and we took it like it was a lifeline. Finally, the twins were in bed, with the lights off, winding down. We listened through the walls, our hearing making baby monitors redundant, as their normal chatter dwindled down to blissful sleep.
When silence had reigned supreme for five straight minutes, Tanya turned to me. “What else should we be doing to prepare? What have we forgotten?”
“Funny you should ask that,” I said. “Are they fully out?”
Her eyes narrowed at me, but she tilted her beautiful head and listened. She nodded.
“Come on,” I held out my hand. “Omega will alert us if they wake up.”
“Correct,” the AI said through a nearby Bluetooth speaker.
I pulled my vampire out the apartment door and into the elevator.
“What are you up to?” she asked, frowning suspiciously.
“Who, me?” I asked, rocking on my heels.
She crossed her arms over her chest and focused her blue eyes on me like sapphire lasers.
The elevator stopped on my chosen floor and I led her off.
“The chapel?” she asked as I pulled her inside.
“Of course,” Barbiel said from behind us.
We turned and found him leaning up against one wall, wearing flip-flops, blue jeans, and a t-shirt that showed one of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel paintings, the Creation of Adam, with God reaching forth to touch Adam’s finger.
“What are you two up to?” Tanya asked, brows arching.
“Show her,” Barbiel said to me.
I reached for my sword, pulling it from whatever dimension it existed in. Then I put it back.
“Your turn,” I said to my vampire. She frowned prettily.
“Time for you to get your sword… or I should say swords, as you seem to favor two,” Barbiel said. Then he reached a hand into nothingness and pulled back out with two silver, glowing short swords clutched in his grip. When he turned and held his arm out in Tanya’s direction and opened his hand, the two glowing blades shot across the room and Tanya caught them by reflex. Immediately, the twin blades sang a note of crystalline purity that took my breath away. The look on her face was priceless—sheer wonder.
“They weigh nothing,” she said, swinging first one and then the other experimentally, the tone of each changing as they sliced through the air.
“Each has the mass of a big truck—except to you,” the angel said.
She jumped, spun, swung low with one and then high with the other, twisted one hundred and eighty degrees, and stabbed in two opposite directions at once. Then she pulled herself upright and turned to the two of us.
“Why now? I can’t use Heavenly weapons in this fight.”
“Correction: Heaven
