“The truth,” he said, the turncoat.
“Janey,” she said, holding me at arm’s length, then pulling me back in for a bone-crushing hug. Literally. She was crushing my bones, and I was pretty sure she was doing it on purpose.
Agent Carson spoke again. “You’ll have to thank Mr. Pettigrew for me, Detective.”
“I sure will,” Bobert said. “He gave it his best shot.”
I straightened my shoulders and tried to speak. It was a pretty good effort, given that no air would pass through my windpipe. “What about Mr. P?”
Bobert grinned. “He was trying to put you off coming out here.”
I gasped. For a really long time. “He was in on it?”
Cookie let go, then questioned her husband with an arch of her brow, equally curious.
“Yes, he was,” Bobert said.
I felt so used. So betrayed. So utterly out of the loop.
“I have to admit,” Agent Carson said, “we didn’t even know about this cabin until you asked Detective Davidson to look into it. You led us straight to them.”
“So you’re dropping the charges?”
“Not on your life.”
We watched all the activity while the EMT finished bandaging my wounds and gave me a tetanus shot. The cut on my foot from last night was already healing. Hopefully this would heal just as quickly. Must’ve been a vitamin freak in my previous life. Probably ate green shit. Stuff that rhymed with ale and… ettuce.
“Hey,” I said, elbowing Cookie to get her attention.
It was her turn on the oxygen mask we found in the ambulance. She pulled it off with a sucking sound and a questioning shrug.
“That’s the guy.” I stood and walked slowly forward, stunned to my toes.
“You’re just doing this because it’s my turn,” Cookie said.
“No, really. That’s the guy.” I pointed. Among the plethora of officers and agents roaming the area both outside and inside the yellow tape stood the massive bald-headed hulk that worked at the dry cleaners. “Hold it right there, mister!”
He turned to me and flashed a nuclear grin. I thought about tackling him to the ground. Instead I just stormed up, all stormy like. About that time I realized he was wearing Kevlar. Did bad guys wear Kevlar?
Before I could say anything, he asked, “Vy you are here?” Then he threw back his big head and laughed.
I was still processing his presence when Agent Carson walked up with the woman from the dry cleaners as well. She also wore Kevlar.
She looked at her comrade. “Vy she is here?” Then they both threw back their heads and laughed. It was so bizarre, like a bad laugh track for a sitcom.
I was in the Twilight Zone. And not the good one the dentist puts you in.
The woman stopped first and pointed to my head wound. “You have balls,” she said. “I am Klava Pajari, and this is my partner, Ilya Zolnerowich. Ve are retired FSB agent. Ve vork —” She considered how to put it. “— job on side.”
“Oh, so this is a side job?”
Ilya nodded. “Because of you, ve sleep together. Vith our minds.”
“You’re psychic lovers?”
Klava gave a nervous chuckle while glaring at Ilya. “His English is not so good. Vat he means is our minds are rest knowing how you have help us. Ve clean your coat for free, yes?”
They laughed again. It echoed through the tilting fun house that used to be my brain.
After they got over teasing me – which took forever – they told me the story of how they had been on the trail of a Russian arms dealer for years. They’d tracked him to America, but he moved around a lot, and they couldn’t get a lock on his location. The only thing he did religiously, no matter where he went, was bet on street fights. He grew up fighting on the streets of Russia and was addicted to the life.
So when the US ignored Russia’s application for extradition, they set up a sting operation involving an illegal street-fighting organization that had been going on for a few months. The metal that the Vandenbergs’ captors were going to plasma-cut through was a panic room, but one set up to keep someone in instead of vice versa, if they should ever catch him. He had a lot of muscle around him. They needed to keep him both hidden and unattainable.
“Is called extraordinary rendition,” Klava said. “Is to kidnap and force transfer of a criminal to another country for prosecution.”
“Ve are like Dog,” Ilya said.
“Dogs?” I didn’t get it. “Like bulldogs?”
“No, Dog the Bounty Hunter. Only I have better hair, yes?” He smoothed a hand over his bald head and laughed again. It was growing on me.
“Is Dog even a thing anymore?”
He pounded his chest. “He is big thing inside me.”
I could have gone so many places with that.
“Ilya is good fighter,” Klava said. “He vin much of money.”
I didn’t doubt it. “You’ve been after this guy for two years? Is he in the area?”
“Da. Ve grab him last veek, but have to keep him in box until papervork is coming through.”
Considering the guy’s illicit hobbies, I shouldn’t have been alarmed, but I was. “You’ve been keeping him in a metal room for a week? He’ll freeze to death.”
“Ve are Russian. Ve can handle ten of your vinters. Also, is heated and cooled and have little toilet.”
This was the craziest story. One that I wouldn’t have pictured if it had been a paint-by-numbers.
“But how do these guys fit in?” I nodded toward the cabin, or, more pointedly, toward the body bags on the ground by said cabin, and shuddered.
“They vere his best customers. Al Qaeda. They vant him back. Mostly, they vant his money and veapons cache.”
“Sucks to be him.”
“Yes!” Ilya slapped me on the back. “Totally.”
I resisted the urge to call him a Valley Girl. Mostly because I used that word way too often myself. And I was afraid of what he’d do to me if I called him a girl.
“Janey?”
I turned to see Mr. V standing there and straightened my shoulders. “Mr. Vandenberg, I thought you were with your family.” They had been taken to the hospital immediately. I’d wanted to see them so bad, but the children were suffering from dehydration and a massive need for therapy for the rest of their natural-born lives.
“I’m on my way,” he said, his voice cracking. “I just —” He stopped and shook his head. “They told me… I don’t know how to thank you.”
I walked up to him and put a hand on his arm. “You could thank me by not pressing charges.” I still had a crapload of antiques to pay for, but if he’d just hold off on the breaking-and-entering snafu…
His brows slid together. “I don’t —”
“It doesn’t matter right now. I’m just glad your family is okay.”
He wrapped long, thin arms around me. I motioned Angel over. I wanted him to be a part of this. Without him, I could never have done what I did. I took Angel’s hand, pulled it to my mouth, and kissed it. He lowered his head, suddenly bashful.
“My daughter was right,” Mr. V whispered into my ear. “You’re an angel.” He set me at arm’s length. “She saw you outside the window. Said you were an angel and you had come to save us. And she was right.”
I shook my head. “She must have me confused with someone else.”
He shook his, too. “Seriously, where do you keep your wings?”
Bobert and Cookie followed me all the way back to Sleepy Hollow. Like right-on-my-tail followed. Like they expected me to do something crazy. Like they didn’t trust me. So weird. I drove straight to the café, and they followed me there, too. It was becoming an issue.
They’d told me Cookie ran out of the café, screaming like a banshee, with no explanation and no forwarding address when Bobert called her. She needed to explain to Dixie what happened. I needed to explain why I missed lunch with Reyes. And to see if he wanted to have sex with me again later. I could pencil him in.
/>
We stormed into the place as if we worked there, and even though it was well past Cookie’s scheduled shift, Dixie put her to work. She was apparently short-handed.
Reyes gave me odd glances, and I wondered if he knew about the Vandenbergs. Or was upset I’d missed lunch with him. I would have called if I hadn’t crushed my phone.
Drawing in a lungful of air, I started toward the back. Shayla stepped in front of me before I got too far.
“Hey, sweetie,” I said before I really looked at her. When I did, I kept the smile on my face because I didn’t know where else to put it.
She gazed at me wide-eyed. Her cute, freckled nose and huge, almost colorless irises made her look utterly fairylike, but now she had a grace she didn’t have before. A gentleness that enraptured me.
Still, in the grand scheme of things, I’d rather have had her as she was. Sweet, caring, and full of life.
I stumbled back a step.
She held out a hand. “It’s okay. I’m okay. I promise.”
She blurred as my vision became flooded with wetness. This wasn’t possible. I’d just seen her the day before, and she was the picture of health. She was happy and vibrant. She fairly glowed. How could that change so fast? How could she become one of the transparent gray departed?
I turned from her and leaned against the checkout counter. Fought to breathe. Struggled for an explanation. After Erin’s baby. After the Vandenberg children. This? Now? Was life really so meaningless? So fragile? So easily lost?
She touched my arm. “Janey, I just stayed for him. For Lewis. Can you get a message to him?”
A tear pushed past my lashes when I looked at her again. Did death really target the innocent? Did it zero in on the purest, most radiant souls?
“Can you please tell him I’ve had the best two days of my life?”
“I don’t understand,” I said at last.
A few of the customers had turned toward me. Dixie stepped out from behind the prep station, wiping her hands on a towel, her expression curious. Cookie stopped what she was doing and stilled.
“I had asthma and severe allergies. It was no one’s fault. I ate a corn dog from Whips. I’ve eaten a hundred. They must’ve switched to peanut oil.”
A soft cry wrenched from my throat, and I sank onto my elbows. If not for the desk, I would’ve crumpled like the three men earlier today. This was not happening.
“I just want Lewis to know how wonderful a person he is. He really has no idea. He needs to know, Janey. And he needs to know how much I loved him.” She stepped closer.
I couldn’t look at her. In spite of all the bravado today, I was a coward after all.
“Promise me,” she said, her tone harder than before, probably to get me to focus.
It was one thing to see the departed as being other. As almost not being real. It was another thing to know on a visceral level that they were once alive and dynamic and worthy of all that life had to offer.
I nodded, agreeing at last, and she smiled. “Thank you.” Without another word, she slipped to the other side.
I clutched the counter, digging in my nails as her life flashed before my eyes. I saw the first time Lewis noticed her. Or kind of noticed her. She’d dropped her books in high school, and as a group of kids beside her laughed, he hurried over, picked them up, handed them to her, then kept jogging as he tried to catch up to his friends. It was the everydayness that captured her. He didn’t do it for accolades. He just did it. It was simply in his nature. She was invisible until that day. That day, that very minute, she decided to be seen.
I saw her watch him at a talent contest in middle school where his band played a Fall Out Boy song. He was lead guitar, and the entire event won him a trophy and a lot of female admirers. Yet there wasn’t a jealous bone in Shayla’s body, because she loved him even then. She was happy for him. Wanted only the best.
I saw her during an asthma attack at her fifth birthday party. It was so bad, she had to be rushed to the hospital. She wasn’t mad that she missed the party or the cake or the time with her friends from the hospital. She was mad because she spilled red Kool-Aid on the dress her mother stayed up all night making for her. It broke her heart, and she cried for hours, so her mother stayed up all night again and made her a shorts set out of what was left.
I saw her the day she was adopted. After she was tossed around a series of foster homes as an infant, her parents finally found her when she was three. She was thin and sickly and had an oxygen tube looped under her nose and around her ears, but they’d recognized her anyway. Said they’d been looking everywhere for her. Even though she was pale with blue eyes and freckles, and they were dark and tall and beautifully exotic, she recognized them, too.
I saw her in the neonatal ICU, shaking with the effects of the drugs, so weak she couldn’t breathe on her own, her heart couldn’t function on its own, so they connected her to a machine that lulled her to sleep with whirring sounds for ten days. The nurses told her to fight with everything she had, so she did.
I saw her come into the world on the filthy floor of a crack den. Her mother had OD’d and was already dead. No one noticed her at first. No one called the police. But it wasn’t their fault. She’d been born invisible. It was a miracle one of the dealers saw her. Not wanting anything to do with the cops, he wrapped her in a shirt stiff with dried blood on it and left her in front of an all-night liquor store.
She turned back to me, a Cheshire smile on her face. Only then did I notice the tattoo she had on the inside of her wrist. INVISIBLE GIRL, NOW SHOWING.
I stood in the present, still clutching the counter, shaking so hard with anger and indignation and outrage that it vibrated. Small clear drops landed on the Formica under my face. Tears had dripped off my chin. The fury inside me took on a life of its own.
“Charley.” Cookie walked slowly toward me, her hands up, her voice soft.
Reyes watched me from the kitchen entrance, his head bowed, his expression one of warning.
Too late.
I released the furious thing inside.
21
I see dead people.
No, wait. I take that back.
I see people I want dead.
—ECARD
It was like in those movies when the misunderstood girl gets so mad she suddenly develops superpowers and blows out the windows of her high school, showering all the kids who were awful to her with shattered glass without meaning to.
It was like that, only I’d meant it.
The world exploded. Everything from the plate-glass windows to the coffee cups that lined the tables splintered into a million sharp, lethal torpedoes. People flew back, their faces frozen in a variety of horrified stages when time slowed to a full stop. Cookie stood before me, reaching out, her face sad. Knowing.
Then I saw Reyes. The anger simmering beneath his steely surface went way beyond what I’d expected. He stood deathly still. His fire blazed around him, the flames reaching all the way to the ceiling and fanning out.
We both turned toward the front door. With fists clenched at my sides, I watched as the angelic being I’d seen before walked toward me. The slivers of glass that hung in the air parted slowly, moving out of his way, tinkling as they bounced off each other. It sounded like ice crackling on a winter’s day.
His wings spanned the entire width of the café before he folded them at his back.
Though Reyes was across the café, the angel addressed him first. “Rey’aziel.”
“Michael.”
The angel faced me, his movements stiff. Formal. “Elle-Ryn-Ahleethia —”
I frowned and stepped back. “Is that my name?”
“— I am sent by the Father Jehovah, the one true God of this dimension, to end your mortal life so that you may ascend to your rightful place of omniscience and duty.”
My anger dissipated, and shock took its place. “I don’t understand.”
“You are Val-Eeth. You are too powerful for this world in this condit
ion.”
I glanced at Reyes. His flames had died down a bit, and he studied Michael with a new curiosity.
“I don’t understand even more.”
Michael eyed me, assessing me with one quick sweep. “Can you imagine what would happen if the detonator for an armed nuclear device fell into the hands of a child?”
“I’m guessing that’s bad.”
“Now imagine that same child holding the detonator for a hundred trillion of them.”
“Since I’m assuming I’m the child in this scenario and I have a detonator of some kind?”
“You are the detonator, Elle-Ryn, and the nuclear devices, all one hundred trillion of them, are inside you.”
I looked down at myself. “I have a bomb inside me,” I said, trying desperately to understand.
“Your inability to comprehend the situation is a rather large part of the problem.”
“How is something like that even possible?”
“And you prove me right again.”
“Quit being a smartass,” I said, taking a step closer. The glass trembled and closed in around him. “I get it. I’m an idiot. Now answer my question. How is something like that even possible?”
“It shouldn’t have been,” he acquiesced. “You should not have come into your powers before your corporeal form expired. You learned your name too soon, and as such, absorbed your powers too soon. As you can see, it was too much for you to regulate. Now you can’t remember your name. Any of them. And you can’t control your anger. You just tried to kill every person in here with a single thought.”
“No.” I stepped back until I hit the counter. “That wasn’t what I was doing.” I glanced around the café. At Dixie and Mr. P and Cookie. “I would never hurt them.”
“What is this, then?” he asked me, indicating the glass that hung like sparkling crystal around us. “And this was just the barest hint of a thought. One infinitesimal inkling that didn’t amount to a single grain of sand in your Sahara. Can you imagine what you’d do with more forethought?”
Reyes was only a few feet away now, slowly advancing, gaining ground.