All Who Wander Are Lost (An Icarus Fell Novel) (14 page)

“
Just
someone.”

Her fingers ceased
drumming and she slapped her open palm on the table, startling me
and making the salt and pepper shakers dance a brief jig. I looked
to see if the noise had upset our server, but she stood near the
register polishing silverware and glanced away when she saw me
looking.

“
Dammit,
Icarus, will you tell me what’s going on?”

Now she swears,
too.

I sighed. Seeing
Poe angry wasn’t as much fun as I might have thought. In fact,
I felt a little bad.

“
Piper,”
I said finally. “Piper helped me get there. She’s with
Beth right now, waiting for an escort.”

“
Piper?
Who’s Piper?”

“
A
guardian angel, like you. You must know her.”

The expression on
her face changed, grew angrier, and it occurred to me that telling a
guardian angel you’re hanging out with another guardian angel
might be akin to telling your girlfriend you had sex with someone
else.

“
I’ve
never heard of her,” Poe said through clenched teeth. “Where
did you find her?”

“
We
bumped into each other at the park.”

“
At
the pond where the nun died?”

“
Yeah.”

“
I
don’t like this, Icarus.”

“
Ric.”

She leaned back and
her expression softened from rageful to angry.

“
I
didn’t want you going in the first place, I certainly don’t
want you to go with someone I don’t know.”

I crossed my arms
and bent one corner of my mouth up in an ‘it’s-your-fault’
kind of smirk.

“
Maybe
you should have come with me, then.”

“
Maybe
I should have,” she said, her voice so quiet I barely heard
her. She looked down at her hands fiddling in her lap—more
like the Poe I knew. She glanced up at me then away. “I don’t
trust her.”

“
You
don’t know her.”

“
Exactly.”

“
Then
you take me back.”

She shook her head,
looked back down at her hands. A few seconds passed before she spoke
again, a touch of sadness in her voice.

“
I’m
going to have to tell Michael what’s going on.”

I bit down against
the anger her words stirred in me. I didn’t want to lash out
now she’d become vulnerable Poe again.

“
He’s
going to be pissed,” she added.

As she spoke, the
bell over the door jingled. My eyes flickered that direction and I
saw Piper stride into the restaurant. When the server offered to
seat her, she simply pointed at our table and sauntered our
direction.

“
Do
what you want,” I said looking past Poe. “We’re
not going to be here very long.”

She glanced over
her shoulder at Piper coming toward us.

“
Is
that her?”

“
Yeah.”

Poe slid out of the
booth and stood, looked at me for a second, then left without a
‘good-bye’, ‘be careful’, ‘take care’
or ‘fare-thee-well’. My gut twisted a bit that she
hadn’t shown some final concern for my well-being; I had to
stop myself from calling after her, though I’m not sure what I
would have said.

As she and Piper
passed in the aisle between tables, their shoulders bumped and the
restaurant crackled briefly with the snap of static electricity.
They faced each other for a fraction of a second and I saw Piper’s
lips move minutely, then Poe continued out of the restaurant. Piper
slid into the seat where Poe had been.

“
Was
that Poe? She warmed the seat for me.”

I nodded. “She
said she doesn’t know you.”

“
We’ve
never met.”

She reached across
the table and plucked a small slab of pork off my plate, popped it
into her mouth. I looked at her with raised eyebrow as she chewed
the piece of meat.

“
Mmm,
that’s good.”

“
How
come you don’t know each other? You’re both guardian
angels.”

Unsurprisingly, she
shrugged. “Different districts. And, frankly, most of the
others don’t want to hang around the ones like her.”

My eyebrows joined
the rest of my face in creating a frown.

“
What
do you mean?”

“
You
don’t know?”

“
Know
what?”

“
I
can’t believe she didn’t tell you.”

“
Tell
me what?”

Piper sighed and
leaned against the red vinyl back of the booth seat.

“
She’s
under investigation.”

“
Investigation?”
What
the Hell was she talking about?
“What
the Hell are you talking about?”

“
Certain
people are suspicious,” she answered with more nonchalance
than the subject appeared to warrant. “They think she might be
playing for the other side.”

My frown
disappeared and I laughed out loud.

“
Poe?
Ridiculous.”

“
Really?
What about all the Carrions around when you harvest a soul?’

I’d been
thinking about the Carrions since Piper mentioned it before and
couldn’t deny I seemed to attract them like kids to an ice
cream truck.

“
Why
do you suppose they keep showing up, Icarus? Do you think Gabriel’s
sloppy with the scrolls?”

Gabe always seemed
quite casual but I guessed one didn’t get to be an archangel
by being bad at their job.

“
I
just thought the Carrions always showed up.”

“
No
one gives them scrolls when someone’s dying. They show up if
they get wind of it on the streets, if someone leaks the info.”

I leaned forward,
elbows on the table, and propped my chin on my fists.

“
Poe.
I don’t believe it.”

Piper shrugged
again and rose from her seat.

“
Why
do you think she’s nervous all the time? Why do you think
she’s so afraid of Michael?”

“
Yeah,
but--”

“
It’s
time for us to go, there’s souls a-waitin’. Pay the
lady.”

She walked out of
the restaurant leaving me pondering her words. I looked longingly
one last time at the pork left on my plate—I usually maintain
a strict policy of ‘no meat gets left behind,’ but we
did have things to accomplish. I left a twenty on the table and
followed the angel out, my head spinning with her revelation.

Had Poe been
setting me up all this time?

Bruce
Blake-All Who Wander Are Lost

We entered Hell
through an abandoned warehouse near the water this time and, upon
our arrival, found no river Styx to cross. Instead, a wide chasm
separated us from the city. I stepped up to the edge and peered down
the sheer side at a swirl of mist hiding the bottom. Mind you, this
was Hell, so who knew if a bottom lurked down there or not.

“
This
doesn’t look good,” I said doing my Captain Obvious
impression.

“
There
must be some way across.”

Piper wandered off
to the right and I watched her go—clearly no way across in
that direction. I looked the other way and saw the fissure
stretching away to the distant, hazy horizon. On our side of the
gap, the land was desolate and barren, on the other, the city seemed
to go on forever. With the chasm too wide to jump, the sides too
sheer to climb—not that I’d have climbed down into the
eerie mist, anyway—there seemed no way to get there from here.

“
Icarus.
Look over here.”

A hundred yards
along the ravine, Piper stood at the end of a decrepit bridge of
rope and wood planks. It swung gently over the gap despite the
stillness of the air.

That wasn’t
there a minute ago.

A shiver wiggled
its way up my spine. Something about this made me several steps
beyond nervous, but I joined Piper by the bridge, anyway.

“
I
don’t feel good about this,” I said.

“
What’s
there to feel good about? This is Hell. Do you want to find your
friends or not?”