From her crouched position, Ginny lunges at Ben as a swath of blood appears across her torso, staining the white shirt. She knocks the axe from his hand and kicks his boots out from under him. He’s no match for her.
Ginny can’t fight Sonia, but she could tear Ben apart.
“Let me help him,” I say, and the ghostly force dies as quickly as it rose. I vault over the concession stand, snatch the axe from the carpet, and stand between them.
For a moment, I see the hope in Ginny’s eyes. Unlike Ben, she knows that I’m one of her kind. She’s already admitted that she wants me. She’s already called me her “hero” twice. I slowly shake my head, leaving no doubt about my intentions.
“You wouldn’t,” Ginny breathes as reality sinks in. She’s been beaten by me, Sonia, and Ben together. Her voice is resigned. Her last words are: “Daddy had such big plans.”
I sever her head with the blade and, shaking, drop the axe handle.
After a stunned moment, Ben climbs to his feet and puts a hand on my shoulder. “You okay, man?”
“Better now,” I say. “You?”
“She came after me on prom night,” he explains. “I’ve been trying to run her out of our town ever since.”
Our town. Ben is Spirit. I’m Spirit. God knows Sonia is Spirit.
Ginny was the new girl again, this time with a new name.
“I tried to warn her off,” Ben adds. “I tried to scare her off. I went to my family for help, but nobody believed me. She didn’t seem like a vampire, you know?”
“Yeah, I know.”
What happened here will stay with Ben for a long time. He isn’t the kind of person who can destroy someone else, even something else, without it weighing on him. I know how he feels and then some.
Ben and I burned Ginny’s and her parents’ bodies (heads, too) behind my barn. We buried the axe, which he’d taken from the mayor’s office, near my uncle.
“Come spring, you might sprinkle some wildflower seed on the graves,” he said. “I mean, they were human beings once.”
I said I would and made a mental note to sprinkle seeds on Uncle Dean’s grave, too.
The next day Ben fibbed to his aunt Betty that the Augustines had packed up and left in the middle of the night for some six-figure job that the mayor landed up north. Ben explained that Ginny told him her dad was too embarrassed to own up to running out on the town after all his big promises. He claimed that’s what their spat in the ticket line had been about.
Betty repeated the story the next day at the beauty shop, and it’s become common knowledge since. The deputy is circulating a petition to put his own name on a mayoral ballot. I signed it last week.
Turns out, Ben’s not a bad guy. His granddad, Sheriff Derek Mueller, had been the vampire hunter who originally chased the Augustines out of town back in the day. The sheriff had passed on what he’d seen, what he’d learned, to Ben so Ben would know what to do if the homicidal undead ever swung back through town.
Ben has decided to work at the Old Love and save up for college. Apparently, being a good athlete by Spirit standards isn’t necessarily the same as being scholarship material. Facing down the undead has grown him up a lot.
He doesn’t know what I am, not yet, but he took it well when I explained about Sonia. I hope that when the day comes, when he realizes I’m not just another hometown boy, he thinks back on what happened and gives me the benefit of the doubt.
Tonight after the Ghostbusters save New York City, I thank Ben for a good night’s work, lock the front door behind him, and once again hear Sonia singing “To Know Him Is to Love Him.”
When I look toward the voice, I see Sonia herself for the first time. She’s taken over one of my jobs, wiping down the concession counter, like it’s no big deal.
Sonia is a see-through figure in a uniform not much different than the one Ginny wore, except that Sonia’s includes a red vest with a gold patch that reads “Love Theater.”
I didn’t realize she was still here. I don’t get it. With Ginny gone for good, why stick around? “Sonia?”
She raises her face, and I see the dimple, the laughing eyes. “Cody!”
“Sonia,” I say in case she didn’t understand what happened, “your murderer has been destroyed. It’s over. You can move on now. You can, uh, go into the light.”
Sonia tilts her head. “It wasn’t all about justice.” Her voice has a hollow quality to it. “Tell me, Cody. Do you believe in love at first sight?”
Staring at her, God help me, I just might. I read on the Web that the more you believe in a ghost, the stronger your feelings for them, the more substantial they become.
With each passing second, Sonia appears more solid, more alive. And I have to admit, in some ways, we would be perfect for each other. We’re both tied to this old theater, we’ll both be teenagers forever, and we’re both dead. Even better, I don’t have to worry about physically hurting her. No flesh. No blood. No problem.
This could become more than the hope of love. It could become the real thing. But there’s something she has to be told first. She may not know what happened at my uncle’s ranch, but I thought she’d figured out what I am from the bottle of blood in the office mini fridge. I guess Sonia didn’t realize what the liquid was or maybe in her ghostly state, some details are fuzzy.
“Sonia,” I begin again as she floats toward me. “There’s something you should know. I’m a monster, the same kind of monster —”
Her cool fingertips press against my lips, and in her gaze, I see complete understanding, total acceptance. “No,” Sonia says. “You’re not.”
UNTIL THE NIGHT I WAS TAKEN, demonically infected, the guardian angel Zachary watched over me. Now, I watch over him.
It’s not your average long-distance relationship. Romantic entanglements between humans and angels are rare, archaic, and discussed only in hushed tones.
A romantic entanglement between a guardian and one of the murderous undead had been unprecedented. Then we fell in love.
One of the consequences of Zachary’s “slipped” status is that, though not fallen, he’s earthbound, limited to corporeal form, and banished from the ethereal plane.
Therefore, he’s banished from me as well . . . at least for the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile, Zachary will continue to devote himself to counseling neophyte eternals, those who might embrace redemption like I did.
Assuming the monster lying in wait for him around that thorny bush doesn’t pluck out his eyes, claw out his throat, and rip his glorious muscled body to bloody pieces.
Zachary is immortal. He wears a gleaming holy sword with a gold hilt, a weapon forged in heaven. His blood is as toxic to an eternal as holy water. Yet he’s no stronger or faster than a mortal man. He can still be brutally injured. He has been in the past.
Far, far, far above, I’m curled in a plush wing chair in a tropical lobby of the Penultimate, the way station for ascended souls immediately outside heaven. I’m one of hundreds of thousands, gazing down on loved ones, enemies, and the occasional celebrity of the day, trying to make our peace before passing through the famed pearly gates.
It’s usually a comfort, watching over Zachary, a way to hold the loneliness at bay. Yet at moments like this, when he’s in danger, I feel every inch the predator defanged.
I zero in on the nearest lakeside dock. Where did the fiend go? I never should’ve taken my eyes off it. Not that I can warn my angel, not that I’m useful in any way.
Zachary scans the shadowy trees. In his matte black cowboy shirt over black jeans and boots, he makes a dashing, romantic figure. My fingertips twitch at the sight of his golden hair, lit by the moon.
He’s come from working as a waiter at a vampire-themed Italian restaurant located a few blocks south. There, the danger is pretend.
It’s past 3 A.M. a few hours before sunrise on New Year’s Day, on the wide hike-and-bike trail surrounding Lady Bird Lake. It’s a natural border, dividing downtown Austin
, Texas, from its south side. Lake is something of a stretch. It looks more like what it is — a dammed section of the Colorado River, lined with trees, brush, and parkland — a playground for waterfowl and boaters, famous for its bats.
You can see across it, stroll from one side of the bridges to the other in only a few minutes. Perhaps I’m biased from having resided on the coast of Chicago’s formidable Lake Michigan, but, to me, it’s more of a water feature than a lake per se.
I slip in my earbuds and raise the volume on my palm-size monitor-com. Now I can hear Zachary’s footsteps on the sandy path and the whiz of a stray bottle rocket, punctuated by a loud popping sound.
Last autumn this park was the scene of a handful of murders — the victims found punctured, nearly emptied of blood. Locals hoped that would be the last of it.
Zachary exudes caution. He carries a heavy flashlight, though it’s not turned on. He’s not emitting heaven’s light or showing his wings either, though he regained those powers during our brief time together. My angel makes every effort to operate incognito.
“Reso, reso, resolution,” begins a stocky figure, who’s somehow doubled back to end up behind Zachary. “Resolved.”
Turning, my angel draws his sword from the scabbard with one hand, clicks on his flashlight with the other, and shines it in the eternal’s — I mean, vampire’s — face.
“Happy New Year, Mitch,” he replies. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Mitch isn’t displaying his fangs, and his cornflower-blue eyes look as cool as creation. He’s dressed up, too. No PJ bottoms or camouflage pants tonight. Instead, he’s shaved and sporting jeans with a long-sleeved black T designed to mimic a tuxedo shirt, jacket, and tie. He’s also holding a cardboard sign, though I can’t see what it says.
“Hap, happy,” Mitch says. “Happily ever after. The end is beginning. It’s the beginning of the end.”
Mitch has been homeless for as long as anyone can remember and is affectionately thought of as a local celebrity. Before he first rose undead, Mitch had been pure of heart — so pure that he could identify Zachary, even in human form, as an angel. Typically, only quite young children possess that level of goodness, innocence, and faith.
Some say that Mitch used to build wells in Ecuador with the Peace Corps. Others claim he was wounded in Vietnam. What I know is that Mitch is young for our, or rather, his kind. He was infected only last September, and for months, he’s been sustaining himself on pig’s blood with the love and support of friends.
“We need to talk,” Zachary begins. “About that kid you drained last night. . . .”
Mitch stares at his torn sneakers. “He was a druggie, drug dealer.”
“He was fourteen. Desperate. Both of his parents lost their jobs last year. He has five younger siblings. They’re struggling to make rent.”
“Mean, you’re mean. I mean, I didn’t mean it that way. I was just saying —”
“What are you saying?” Zachary presses.
It’s not like him to lose patience. My angel blames himself for the boy’s death.
Painful as it is, he’s not being unfairly self-flagellating. What happened was foreseeable. If Zachary had already struck Mitch down, the teen would still be alive.
I could’ve warned him that this would happen, that Mitch could only manage his bloodlust so well for so long.
Then again, perhaps Zachary wouldn’t have believed me anyway. He’s a confirmed optimist. He doesn’t know the thick, sticky satisfaction of nursing from a savaged, leaking vein. He doesn’t miss it like I do.
Mitch replies, “I, I, bye. Bye-bye, Zachary. It’s time. Resolution. Resolved.”
He holds up his hand-lettered sign. It reads:
“You’re sure?” my angel asks, and I hear the catch in his voice. He may have set out tonight to remove Mitch as a threat. Yet now that the neophyte is willingly offering to end his existence, it’s become a matter of resolve for both of them.
Mitch has taken lives — more than one. He’s orchestrated violent, bloody deaths. Yet I serve as proof that a killer may be forgiven. I was ten times the monster that Mitch is, a fiend to whom other fiends groveled and bowed.
At the same time, Zachary can’t know whether he’ll be sending his friend to the Penultimate en route to heaven or whether he’s condemning a once-kind man to hell.
Zachary turns off the flashlight and tosses it aside. The blade of his sword bursts into flame. Raising the weapon, he begins, “What you’re doing . . . Offering yourself to the Big Boss, there’s no better decision you could’ve made. You’re going out a hero.”
My angel said as much to me when I begged him to use his holy radiance to burn me to nothingness, when I surrendered my own demonic existence for true eternal life.
I can only imagine how painful tonight must be for Zachary, having to once again destroy someone he cares about. It must bring back memories.
It’s archangels that are warriors born, not guardians.
Guardians are sent to earth to care.
“Good, good,” Mitch replies. “Good for you. You’re good, too. Hero.”
Zachary’s fiery blade falls on Mitch’s last word.
IF I SCREW UP AGAIN, I’m one toasted guardian angel (GA). We’re talking hellfire and damnation. Hot. Searing hot. Chomp the serrano peppers. Chug the Tabasco.
In case there’s any doubt, the archangel Michael himself materializes on the dock to tell me so. “That was unnecessarily costly and dramatic,” he announces. “Zachary, how many times must we review this? Though the neophyte vampire’s soul may have been temporarily salvageable —”
“He was still tainted by evil,” I recite, returning my sword to its scabbard. “When he became an immediate threat to the living, I shouldn’t have hesitated to destroy him.”
I’m not inclined to argue. Michael is the Sword of Heaven, the Bringer of Souls, my supervisor. Besides, he’s right.
I bend to pick up my flashlight and hook it to my belt.
“Once again, you have indulged your feelings at the expense of the greater good,” Michael thunders. “Your friend’s victim, fourteen-year-old Jorge Alvarez, didn’t find out that his father got the janitorial position at Dell until after he recovered from the shock of dying. If Jorge had lived, that drug deal may have been his last.”
I’m not sure about that, but it’s not worth debating. The boy is dead. That’s all that matters now. That and his grieving family.
I’d worried when Mitch didn’t stop by over the holidays to pick up his latest supply of pig’s blood. I should’ve assumed the worst and followed up then. But I wanted to give him the opportunity to choose salvation. And he did. Only too late for Jorge.
Sounding weary, Michael says, “You are a slipped angel, Zachary — granted, one who has shown promise. You earned back your wings and the power of heaven’s light, and you have put them to good use. But that in no way should be interpreted to mean that your current status, let alone eventual full reinstatement, is guaranteed.”
Another bottle rocket whizzes into the night with a bang. Michael adds, “Perhaps this assignment is too much for you.”
These days, I’m only specifically assigned to watch over one vamp, a teenager named Quincie Morris. But the deal is that if I can help save every redeemable neophyte, I’ll be allowed to return upstairs. I’ll be welcomed home. Reunited with Miranda.
The only problem? Fulfilling my mission is freaking impossible. Vamps grow in number with each passing night.
Then again, prior to me, the archangel had written off the neophyte undead completely. Devoting one GA to the cause is still better than devoting none.
“Another mistake of this magnitude,” Michael adds, “and you’ll have exhausted your second chance. I’ll have no choice but to recommend that you be permanently exiled from Grace and that your assignment be given to a more capable guardian.”
“But —”
“One more mistake, Zachary, and you’ll find yourself in hell.”
I HATE SECRETS. From day one, my parents made it clear that I couldn’t tell anyone about our family. I can’t talk about the fact that Mom’s a werewolf, Dad’s a human, and I’m a hybrid. Shifters are naturally born. But I can’t speak out against humans who claim we’re preternatural monsters. I can’t fight back when bigots take away jobs. Even lives.
I have a lot at stake. Mom’s wedding-planner business. Dad’s professorship in engineering. Our middle-class life in the newly repaired McMansion. All that could be ripped away if our family’s mixed heritage became public. When my kid sister, Meghan, was born, I had her to protect, too.
Now, I have secrets to keep from my family as well. Two biggies: (1) Quince is a vampire, and (2) Zach is her guardian angel. A secret is a burden. It’s exhausting, a lie.
Zach hasn’t told Quince what happened with Mitch. I don’t want to see her hurt. What’s between me and Quince is more than puppy love. She may not need to breathe, but she’s like air to me. But that’s inevitable. If Zach doesn’t tell her soon, I’ll have to.
When the angel yawns, I push the issue. “So, Zach, when did you come in last night?”
The angel shoots me a reprimanding look.
“Yeah, you weren’t here when I got home,” Quince adds. She leans into her open refrigerator. She digs through plastic containers and aluminum-foil-covered plates of tamales and casseroles. Leftovers from the holidays. “I called your cell a couple of times. I was about to go looking when I heard you land on the roof.”
“I had something to do.” Zach disappears into Quince’s dining room. He’s carrying two glasses of iced tea. A mug of porcine blood is warming for Quince in the microwave.
“Aha!” Quince finally locates the Sanguini’s take-out bag. She sets it on her kitchen counter. “I want you guys to try this proposed dish for the catering menu.”