Blessed (21 page)

“Old love songs, best friends, the collected works of J. R. R. Tolkien, crispy pork egg rolls with just the right amount of grease, the Big Boss, and eternity.”

“The Big Boss?”

Zachary pointed up, as if to heaven.

“Pious,” I teased.

We moseyed down the winding residential street, past cottages, bungalows, artsy modern houses, and a B and B whose owners had had their dead lawn sprayed green.

“Listen, Quincie,” Zachary began again, his hand resting on the hilt of the sword. “I know this isn’t easy to talk about. But I was wondering about the night you first rose undead.”

I paused on the sidewalk, and so did he. “What about it?”

“Well, you mentioned the lakefront.”

Mitch.
He was looking for confirmation that Mitch was a killer vampire.

I took a few steps and shook my head. “I don’t want to discuss it.”

“Quincie —”

“No.” I faced him. “Look, the Moraleses’ house is just another block down. We’re both tired, and I don’t feel like talking anymore.”

He opened his mouth to say something, but I cut him off. “Good night, Zachary.”

“Good riddance.”

“Stop that!” I exclaimed.

“I’m sorry,” Zachary said, assuming my rising frustration was all about him. “I didn’t mean to . . . I’ll see you tomorrow.” He turned to leave and retraced our steps, pausing to glance back at me as a sports car passed by.

I waved a little. Then he waved back, and we were almost friends again. Almost.

Earlier tonight, I’d assured Clyde that I wasn’t naive anymore. I’d felt so confident right then, but now, I wasn’t sure what to think.

Moving on, I noticed a scarecrow seated on a hay bale on the porch of a lime-colored cottage. A homemade-looking ghost hung from a tree branch. Plastic tombstones littered the yard. The one closest to the street read
RIP
. A tempting thought.

As I rounded a bend, from within a row of tall hedges, a viselike grip seized my wrist and began dragging me around and onto the nearby front lawn of a deeply set-back Spanish Colonial. It was the suit-and-tie vampire with the mullet ’do from Friday night.

“Zachary!” I shouted, remembering that he had his sword with him.

I twisted my wrist free, grabbed the strap of my backpack, and swung it, knocking my assailant into the air. Seconds later, as Mullet Man climbed to his feet, a heavy mist solidified into his dressed-for-success female companion, the one with the beauty mark.

“I told you,” I said. “I don’t know where Brad is, and I don’t give a damn.”

Slowly circling, their arms spread like basketball guards, the vampires didn’t bother to answer. Just my luck. I had all these spiffy new superpowers and no idea how to use them in a fight. The holy water stashed in my pack and bra might work as a weapon, but I needed to keep my hands free.
“Zachary!”

Suddenly, he was there — winded from running, furious at the scene, and with his sword drawn. “As a member of Her Majesty’s gentry,” Zachary began, “this girl is entitled to certain rights under the Mantle.”

Oncoming headlights caught my eye, and Mole Woman tore a thin branch off a pecan tree. She sprang, her makeshift weapon aimed at my heart.

Zachary neatly stepped between us, bringing up the blade of his sword — his suddenly
flaming
sword — and slicing her diagonally in two. The body fell in pieces, combusting, and I turned to see Mullet Man run off toward the city.

“Duck!” Zachary shouted, and I fell forward onto the dry grass as his fiery weapon flew overhead.

I pushed to my knees to witness the male vampire struck, to watch the flames engulf and decimate his dead body.

Within seconds, smoke swirled from the ground where each soulless monster had been destroyed. Impressive. A little too impressive. There had been no torch that night at the park when I’d collided with Zachary. It was the sword all along.

I’d been comfortable with the idea of him as a shifter. I lived with shifters, called them friends. I loved a hybrid Wolf. Werepeople were natural, like humans — only stronger, faster, with keener senses, and able to change form.

As Zachary moved to my side, I said, “What you just did, that was magic.”

And not black-cherry-scented-tea-light, would-you-like-some-herbal-tea-bags-with-that-packet-of-lemon-bath-salt magic. We were talking destructive magic. Demonic magic? Was
Zachary
magic, or just his sword?

Like he had on his first night at Sanguini’s, he offered me a hand up.

This time I stood on my own. “Don’t touch me.”

“Quincie,” he began, “I can explain.”

The oncoming car had veered off at the V in the road. A neighbor’s dog was barking. The upstairs lights of the Spanish Colonial had all been turned on. We had to get out of there, but should I be going anywhere with him?

“It’s not what you think,” he said. “I, um . . .”

I’d officially had
enough
of mysterious, good-looking, older guys from Sanguini’s who weren’t what they seemed. I ran from my self-proclaimed savior, ignoring his calls, into the night.

As the laptop booted, I could hear animal paws — too small to be a shifter — padding around on the Moraleses’ roof. I hadn’t noticed them before, but I hadn’t been on full alert to the same extent, and I didn’t have Meara’s hearing either.

Varmints, Roberto had called them.

Angelina had stuck her head out of Meghan’s room as I’d come up the stairs that night, but she and her pups were quiet.

I keyed
flaming sword
into a search engine, clicked a link on related mythology, and started reading. After making a page of notes in Frank, I tried the keywords again. As I scrolled a bit, a reference to the Garden of Eden caught my attention.

Without pausing to think too hard about it, I went to the bookshelf for Grandma Morris’s Bible and turned to Genesis.

I recalled the reappearance of The Banana in Sanguini’s back lot . . . the first time I’d seen Zachary, battling a vampire not far from a certain failed hex-removal spell . . . the way he’d saved my hairspray-shellacked head from the falling tray of flaming brandied peaches and ice cream . . . how he and his friends had filled the open jobs and leased my house and invited me to move back to my bedroom whenever.

I remembered Zachary standing against the hazy neon of South Congress on Sanguini’s roof and the way he’d been so protective of me against the Mullet Man and Mole Woman, both in the dining room and in the neighborhood.

A flaming sword.

I heard a skittering from above and a
woof
from down the hall. Glancing at the ceiling, I kissed the leather-bound Bible and returned it to its place on the shelf next to my parents’ wedding album. Then I crossed to the window, crawled outside, and began scaling up the front of the Morales house.

Even though I’d come up to the roof planning to confront Zachary, it still delighted me to find him there, sitting with what might’ve been the same three young raccoons from the park. One walked across his lap while the other two sniffed around.

“You’re not a werelion,” I announced, pushing up to stand.

“Are you trying to start an argument?” he began. “Because I never said I was.”

I crossed my arms. “How about this one: you’re an angel.”

“What?” he replied, not meeting my gaze. “Who? What?”

Nice comeback. Raising my voice, I replied, “I said —”

“Shhh!” he scolded. “Kieren’s mom might hear us.”

“You want to play it that way, fine,” I said, opening my arms wide. “Catch.”

I free-fell backward off the two-story McMansion, and before I could panic or doubt, strong arms scooped me up safe. I glimpsed enormous white wings and then was plopped down barefoot on the dry grass in the side yard, faced with a very cranky angel.

“What were you thinking?” His wings had vanished, apparently at will. “You could’ve broken bones, severed your spine, ended up in a wheelchair or with permanent brain damage. Do you
want
to spend your supposedly immortal existence in a vegetative state?”

“I
knew
you’d catch me,” I exclaimed, bouncing on the balls of my feet. I hadn’t been this bubbly about anything since before I’d died — no, before that, since before my parents’ accident. A real live angel, and we were friends. Sort of.

“I’m not infallible.” Zachary began rubbing his temples. “I can’t believe I just blew my secret identity again. No wonder I’m —”

“Why are you following me around?”

“I belong to you,” he said. At my double take, he clarified. “I mean, I’m your guardian angel. Newly assigned. Middle management didn’t bother to float me a background file or anything so I’m having to sort of wing this. No pun intended.”

I bent to retrieve a dog-chewed Frisbee from the dry grass. I’d remembered the cherubim with the flaming sword who’d guarded the Tree of Life, and I’d done my time in Sunday school. But I wasn’t a biblical scholar or even that regular of a churchgoer. “Vampires get guardian angels?”

“Up until now, only natural beings with souls — like humans and shape-shifters — were assigned guardians. But we’re the first match in . . . let’s call it a pilot program involving neophyte vampires, those with at least some of their soul still left.”

Thinking that over, I tossed the Frisbee at Zachary, who snatched it from the air. “Why would I be the first?”

“Beats me,” he replied. “I’m not the all-knowing one.” For a long moment, he frowned down at the plastic disc in his hands. “But I can already tell that you, the
real
you, are worth saving.” He studied me. “You’re a sweet, smart, very hardworking girl. You’re funny, and though you hold most of them at arm’s length, anyone could see how much the staff at Sanguini’s means to you. How important it is to you to stick with your family business. And despite what you’ve become, you’re making a sincere effort not to kill anybody.”

“Uh, thanks,” I said, not sure all of that had been a compliment.

Headlight beams from a passing pickup truck illuminated the side yard, and Zachary motioned for me to follow him past the veggie garden, toward the back of the property. “Quincie, I’m glad that you’re happy about this. But it’s only fair that you know — I don’t have a great track record. I’m not even a fully powered GA. For the foreseeable future, I’ve been banished from the celestial plane. For a while, I lost my wings, and even now I’m earthbound, stuck in corporeal form.”

I took a giant step back. “You’re a fallen angel?”

“Not fallen,” he insisted. “Slipped.”

I stayed where I was. “Like Lucifer?”

“Not like Lucifer!” he exclaimed, indignant.

I almost apologized, but then he tossed the Frisbee back and added, “Except maybe for a bit of pride. Besides, Lucifer didn’t just slip. He fell. All the way down.”

As I fumbled the catch, Zachary went on, “That doesn’t have to happen to us.”

I believed him. I did. And it was all so amazing. Aimee had been right. It was time for good things to happen again. “There’s something I have to tell you,” I said. “It’s about Brad, about what he did —”

“Quincie!” Dr. Morales called from the back door. “Is that you out there?”

Damn. “Tomorrow,” I whispered. “Tomorrow we have to talk.”

When I stepped into the kitchen, Dr. Morales asked, “Everything okay?”

“I thought I heard something outside,” I said. “Um, raccoons. It turned out to be some baby raccoons.” I suppressed a smile. “Can’t sleep?”

“Can’t stop thinking about Kieren,” Roberto admitted, plugging in the coffeepot. “Wondering how he’s doing. It’s different for Meara. She knows about pack life. She knows what it means to manage a shift or not. She was raised with certain ideas about life as a wereperson. I respect all that. I do. But . . .”

“You never wanted him to leave in the first place,” I realized out loud.

Dr. Morales’s eyes went misty. “He should’ve had a chance to play football and graduate with his class and . . . You both deserved more, better than what you got.”

He gave me a big dad hug, and I just went with it.

I hadn’t been able to get ahold of Zachary yet that morning, but Clyde and Aimee met me before school on the front steps. At my request, they’d stopped by Sanguini’s on the way and picked up a fresh sports bottle of porcine blood, courtesy of Nora.