Alaskan Fury (43 page)

Imelda was dealing with angels. 
For over two weeks, ever since the djinni’s careful word-weaving around the
fact, she had been sure of it.  Two angels:  One who claimed to have been
‘tossed out,’ and one who spent untold hours extracting confessions with pain
and blood.  Which was the true angel?  Which spoke at the behest of God?  How
could both be God’s Chosen?  Why did the wolf’s pendant still channel holy
fire, if the wolf had indeed fallen?  Yet why would God allow that same angel
to be bitten by a wolf, in the first place?  Or why would God send his
messenger to dabble in the blood of demons?  She groaned and rubbed her
forehead, trying to sort through the possibilities.

“Let your Vater worry the details
for you,” Herr Drescher said, giving her a worried look.  They were en route to
her Padre’s house yet again, as Imelda could not seem to stay away, and she now
had standing orders from Padre Vega that, at the first sign of a bad migraine,
she was to come to his home and take a nap in his recliner.  “That’s his job,
Inquisitorin, and you’re still recovering.”

She smiled in gratitude to the
German.  “What amazes me,” she said.  “Is that, despite all my unreasonable
demands, at odd hours of the night, you have always been willing to take me to
my Padre.”

Herr Drescher frowned.  “If I’d
had my way, I would have flown you to his house the moment you woke up after
your collapse, and left you there a few weeks to recuperate.”

“A few weeks.”  Imelda snorted. 
“I was not that bad.”

Her pilot gave her a sideways
glance.  “We thought we were going to lose you, Inquisitorin,” Herr Drescher
ventured, as they slipped south.  His words were almost timid.  “For several
minutes, you had no pulse.”

Imelda made a dismissive gesture
in disgust.  “I needed to sleep, nothing more.”

Herr Drescher seemed to bite his
lip.  “I guess now is as good a time to tell you as any.”  He took a deep
breath and let it out fast, ruffling his big blond beard.  “While you were in
your coma, Zenaida…questioned…your ability to run the djinni mission.  And,
with the Große Inquisitor on an errand to Rome…”  Hesitantly, he offered, “I
made my displeasure known, but…”  He shrugged.  “The official orders just came
in.  You have some time to rest, Inquisitorin.”

Imelda felt as if the weight of
the ages were pressing down on her.  So that explained Jacquot’s abruptness on
the phone, and the technician’s embarrassment.  “She got me removed from the
mission?”  Could that be why she’d made no more forward progress with the
case?  Why all of her leads had suddenly seemed to dry up?  Why Jacquot
suddenly seemed to be too busy to talk to her?

Herr Drescher winced.  “In all
honesty, Inquisitorin, you probably did not have the authority to charter this
flight, but die Schlampe can lick my Arsch.”

Imelda snorted.  “Zenaida does
not have the power to take that authority from me.  She is a Segunda
Inquisidora, not the Holy Matron, as she would like everyone to believe.”

Herr Drescher’s grin widened. 
“In
greater
honesty, I probably should’ve told you this awhile ago, but
I
probably shouldn’t be chartering this flight, since I got myself banned from
the cockpit earlier this week.”  He beamed at her as he adjusted the
helicopter’s cyclic control.  “Would you like to stop at a pub on the way
back?”

Imelda frowned.  “Zenaida
grounded
you?  Why?”  Herr Drescher was one of the Order’s best, and the knowledge left
her with a sinking feeling in her gut.  If Zenaida was willing to ground him
for defiance—something that helicopter pilots were
known
for—what would
she be willing to do for taking an Order helicopter against orders?

Herr Drescher merely shrugged. 
“I put the Frenchman in the hospital.”

Imelda blinked.  “Jacquot is in
the hospital?”  Now that she thought about it, she
did
remember seeing
Jacquot with a bruised face, several days ago.  Then she frowned.  “A simple
brawl isn’t enough grounds to take a pilot’s wings.  What
else
did you
do?”

The German shrugged.  “Die dumme
Zimtzicke has been looking for an excuse for a couple decades now.”  He made a
rude gesture back in the general direction of the compound, then beamed back at
Imelda.  “Can’t imagine why.”

“Well, I’ve un-grounded you. 
Zenaida wishes to argue that, we can take it before the Grand Inquisitor.  What
of the rest of my team?”

Herr Drescher winced again.  “As
of the moment your heart stopped the second time, Inquisitorin, your team was
requisitioned.  Zenaida is running the hunt through the north.  She’s
re-directed all of the Order’s Alaskan forces at the djinni.  Even pulled in
the ones from the panhandle.” 

Imelda could not believe that.  “
All
?”
she demanded. 

“And has requested ten times the
number from Grand Inquisitors in the Lower 48 and Canada,” Herr Drescher
agreed.  “And she must’ve been spying on you somehow, because she’s telling
everyone it’s not a wolf at all, Inquisitorin, but a fallen angel.”

Imelda felt her chest suddenly
seize, remembering the angels of her dreams.  “
Zenaida
said that?  While
I was
asleep
?  Where did she get her information?”  She herself hadn’t
even figured out the link between the angels and the pendant for
sure
until speaking to the two fugitives.  Then again, if someone had given her a
good
description
of the talisman…

Jacquot.
  The man had a
memory like a steel trap, and she had shown it to him that night beside the wolf’s
body.

Herr Drescher laughed.  “I’m not
sure, but she has the Frenchman completely in her pocket.  He wouldn’t even
speak to me, after I refused to leave my vigil at your side.  Spat at me,
even.  Just last week, the dumbass tried to tell me you were in league with
Satan, and that’s why you collapsed during Mass.  Fucking Frenchmen.”  He
frowned at her.  “Why?  It
is
an angel, isn’t it?”  As if he were
discussing the color of snow.

“I believe so,” Imelda said. 
“Though I’m still deciding whether it’s fallen or not.”  The wolf had sounded
rather sure that she wasn’t fallen, and then had proceeded in an egotistical,
self-righteous rant that sounded more like it had come from a crude and violent
princeling than a messenger of God.  But then, if one was a messenger of God,
able to kill a hundred and eighty-five thousand Assyrians in one night, would
one not be entitled to feel a bit of righteous superiority?  She thought of
Zenaida’s confidence, and realized, with growing unease, that it was naggingly
similar to the wolf’s, though Zenaida’s threats were much more sedate…and more
sinister.  And, while Imelda believed that the wolf would do exactly as she
threatened, given the opportunity, the woman hadn’t dwelt upon how much she
would make the death
hurt
.  That was Zenaida’s forte.

Then Imelda frowned at the
German, realizing what he had said.  “Jacquot
spat
on you?”

But Herr Drescher was giving her
a long, hard look.  “You think it might not be
fallen
?  After killing an
entire team of our brethren?”

“Too many things don’t add up. 
Zenaida—” she hesitated, unsure how much of her theories to tell the German. 
“Zenaida wears the same pendant I took from the wolf.”  There.  Let him come to
his own conclusions.

For a long time, the German
stared out the window at the horizon, obviously deep in thought.  Then, softly,
he cursed.  “Damn Jacquot.  The fool is just like Giuseppe, as much as I loved
the Italian Wichser.  He thrives on the letter of the Bible, not the spirit of
it.”

Imelda frowned at him, unsure
which conclusions that Herr Drescher had drawn from the information, yet
unwilling to ask.  “And he said I was in league with Satan?  Because I
collapsed in Mass?”

Herr Drescher shrugged.  “Also
said something about Signs and witches and you protecting the Devil, but I
wasn’t really listening after I punched him in the face.” 

…and you protecting the Devil.
 
Imelda digested that in silence, returning her gaze to the snowy slopes of the
Chugach Range that were even then passing beneath them.  Was she?  Did Zenaida
simply have more information than she did?  Was she linked directly to God, and
had known all along?  Was Imelda really just five steps behind?

…or was Zenaida simply
recognizing a Sister and determining her to be a threat?  And if so,
why
?

She sat in contemplative silence
as the German flew her over the Chugach Mountains and to Padre Vega’s tiny
retirement home.  As soon as Herr Drescher lowered the helicopter to the
ground, Imelda ducked out and, head down, hurried to the front door.  Padre
Vega’s small Volkswagen sat under a new dusting of snow in the front yard. 
Passing it, she climbed the steps, crossed the small porch, and knocked on the
door.

Usually the Padre had the door
open by the time the helicopter had touched its skids to the ground, but this
time, the house remained dormant.  Imelda frowned when her repeated knocks
brought no response.  While a helicopter of the Order was
quiet
, it
certainly could not be missed when it settled down in one’s front yard.  Trying
the door, she found it locked.  She went to the window and peered inside.

The house was dark.  Imelda was
about to turn away, thinking that her Padre had been picked up by a neighbor
for a card game or theological discussion at Sleepy Dog, the cozy little
coffee-house in the center of Eagle River, when she saw the mug lying at the
edge of the kitchen floor, cracked in half.

She backed away from the window,
her heart pounding.  Returning to the door, she started pounding on it in
earnest, now, a sinking slime of dread beginning to congeal in the pit of her
stomach.  When her Padre did not emerge, she hit it with her shoulder.

She might as well have been
hitting it with a feather.  Her world burst into an array of stars, and she
fell to her knees with the wash of weakness that came with the impact. 
I am
recovering from a coma,
she thought. 
And I’m trying to break down a
door?
  Fighting nausea, she pushed herself back to her feet and stumbled
across the yard to the helicopter.  The rotors were still winding down when she
yanked open the pilot’s compartment.

Herr Drescher, who was busying himself
with a
Playboy
, quickly tucked it under his seat with a sheepish grin. 
“Uh, yes, Inquisitorin?”

“I need you to break down the
door,” she said.

The older German blinked at her,
then at Padre Vega’s home, then he grabbed the supports and heaved himself out
of the cockpit.  “Is something wrong with dein Vater?” he asked, as he strode
towards the cabin.

“Just get me inside.”  Imelda’s
chest was hurting so acutely that she knew she was close to crying

Herr Drescher pulled his pistol
as he walked to the steps and barely paused at the front porch, smoothly
kicking the door open and stepping inside.

Imelda followed on his heels,
desperate to see her Padre alive and well, sleeping somewhere in a secluded
corner of the house.  What she found after checking every bedroom and the
bathroom, however, left her throat constricting in fear.  Not only was the
Padre nowhere to be seen, but he had left his long black coat and his
rabbit-lined hat hanging on the hooks in the entryway.

“I’ll check outside,” Herr
Dresher said, leaving her in the kitchen to make circuit of the grounds.

But, with a growing pang of
dread, Imelda knew her Padre wasn’t going to be outside.  Two coffee-stained
mugs sat upon the counter, with a third broken in half upon the tiles of the
kitchen floor.  The coffee pot was still on, its contents long since burned to
a black film.

Numbly, Imelda went to switch it
off.

“He’s not outside,” Herr Drescher
said, striding back through the door.  “Shall I contact the Order?”

“The Order,” Imelda whispered,
“is what did this.”  And, in that moment, she knew where she would find her
Padre.  Zenaida would settle for nothing less.

Herr Drescher gave the cracked
Jefferson mug a long glance.  “They finally found out he was a Seer, didn’t
they?”

Imelda froze.  Very slowly, she
turned to look at the German, her heart hammering in her ears.  “
What
did you say?”

Herr Drescher shrugged.  “We
played cards, oh, thirty years ago.  He won too much.  I called him on it.”

Imelda stared at her pilot.  “He
trusted you with that?”  She felt wronged that it had taken her this long to be
told.

“Nein,” Herr Drescher said
solemnly.  “But I saw the fear in his eyes.”  He grinned.  “That, and after
that, he lost every game.  I made the old fart play darts and pool from then
on.”  Sobering again, he glanced at the helicopter.  Very delicately, he said,
“Inquisitorin, if I may say so, your Padre lived a long, good life, and he
would have no qualms with you having me fly you somewhere very far away.  Like
Mongolia.”