The Seer's Lover (The Seven Archangels Series) (10 page)

As soon as she stood up, Nara killed the lights inside the plane with a wave of her hand. People moaned. “Looks like a bit of technical difficulty with the lights everyone,” the pilot said over the loudspeaker. “We should have it fixed very soon. There’s nothing to worry about.”

She worked her way to the back of the plane with a small flashlight in her hand. In less than a minute, she settled comfortably back into her window seat, and the interior plane lights came back on. The passengers murmured sighs of relief.

Shane raised his eyebrows. “Well?”

“Six babies on the flight. One is an angel. Seats thirty-two B and C.”

The reality of what he’d agreed to slapped him in the face. Angel babies were few in number and hard to spot. He’d thought the chances were slim to none of finding one on this flight.

He was dead wrong.

Did she choose this flight on purpose? Baby angels and demons were identifiable by their eyes. The “bright carpet” was a reflective layer of tissue at the back of the eye, the scientific name being the tapetum lucidum. The same light caused cats’ eyes to glow in the dark, giving them better night vision. Angel and demon babies were hard to spot because they didn’t emit a full aura until adulthood. The only way to identify them was to shine a light on their face in the dark.

Angel eyes glowed white and demon’s glowed red.

Nara snuggled under his arm. “Turn around and have a look.”

He looked over his right shoulder.

Nara held onto his upper arm with a vice-like grip, her power to temporarily dull his pain coursing through him. He welcomed the relief. She leaned in close and whispered in his ear. “See the baby, Shane? Get it for me, for us. Do this and we’ll be a family. I promise. We could even have our own children.”

Family.

He’d wanted a family. But not with Nara, with Calise. He wavered. Images of Calise replayed in his head. His body cramped, and his head pounded. His heart pressed on his lungs, and he gasped for air, for release from the horror. Having one angel baby sold in exchange for him to be released from his prison seemed worthwhile. “There’s no other way?” Shane became like stone, tension seeped into every cell of his being.

“No. This is the fastest way to make it happen. I won’t leave you. I promise falling will take away the pain, and we can start again. We can live this life together. Don’t you see? I’m capable of love, and I want to be with you. I could defy my parents…together we could stop their angel baby black market. But first, they need to trust you.” She placed her hand on top of his. Her black aura mingled with his golden one, already producing a gray color.

He swallowed hard, losing all sense of direction. Shane looked back again at the angel baby, and his vision tunneled as his purpose set.

They deplaned with the other passengers and followed the human couple with the angel baby to baggage claim. Many angels are born into shit families like he had been. The child would rise above it and escape. Nara promised that her father’s connections in the black market were a straight business deal for profit. The child likely wouldn’t even be sold to demons, just rich humans hungry for a healthy baby.

Nara stood with Shane by the luggage belt and wrapped both of her arms around him. “C’mon. That angel will be fine. Humans aren’t capable of true love anyway.” She rested her head on his shoulder. “Remember Calise? She never turned back once after she dumped you. Humans don’t deserve angel babies; they don’t have a fraction of the ability to return the love an angel can offer. But if we both rose and had a child, think what we could accomplish together.”

Shane thought of his own wretched human parents; they were never able to return the love he bestowed on them and neither could Calise. Nara was right. He sighed, defeated. Before he could change his mind, he walked over to the family at baggage claim. “Need some help?”

“Ah…no, man. We’re good.” The husband bristled at the offer, then turned back to watch the belt rotating with other people’s luggage chugging by. He tapped his foot and jangled the loose change in his pocket. His dark blond hair and business suit suggested his travel to Costa Rica would mix business and pleasure. The wife juggled the baby and a diaper bag while she attempted to attach the car seat to the stroller. Her wrinkled white blouse and creases on her face suggested she and the child had slept most of the flight.

“Here, let me help with him.” Shane put his arms out and the woman looked into his angelically beautiful face. She handed over her baby boy without a second of doubt.

Moving faster than the human eye could follow, he relocated a hundred yards away and watched the woman situate the empty carrier in the stroller. When she turned back and realized they’d vanished, she screamed.

Nara and Shane exited quickly through the revolving doors. They approached an oversized off-road truck. A window lowered to expose Nara’s father.

Shane’s aura started to flicker. He looked down at the child clutched in his arms. A gray fog materialized at his fingertips and worked its way up his arms. Almost there. He only needed to complete the transaction willingly.

“You have no choice now. It’s done. Give my father the baby.” Nara said.

Abaddon got out of his vehicle and slammed the door hard. The mammoth demon towered over him, red eyes blazing. Dressed in black from his shades to his shoes, Abaddon commanded respect from his crew cut and hulking frame to his rippling black aura and inlaid gold necklace designating him the Ambassador of Hell.

Shane couldn’t turn back. He’d put himself in a position where he’d be killed if he didn’t finish the deed.

“This is obviously your destiny, boy.” He placed a hand on Shane’s shoulder.

Shane recoiled. Emptiness and cold seeped into him through Abaddon. Maybe this was his destiny. What Father would allow him to love someone so deeply then expose their innate human cruelty? Were humans really worth protecting?

Nara placed her hand on his other shoulder. “Give him the child.”

Shane submitted. He handed the angel to Abaddon and the baby promptly began wailing. He followed helplessly as Abaddon walked back into the airport and entered a men’s bathroom, carrying the infant, his hand under its stomach, head facing down. He reminded Shane of a mother cat who picks up her young by the scruff of the neck, carrying them because she has to, not necessarily because she wants to.

Nara held him back while the baby wailed. He shivered, and Nara ran her fingers through this thick hair. The transformation spoiled his essence like rotting meat. God’s grace left him, and a gray fog settled over and enveloped him, becoming his aura. The misty cloud soaked into his body and weighed him down with the depression of a hundred miserable days. Tears streamed down his cheeks.

He felt empty.

Vacant.

Worse than if Calise had left him a thousand times. He regretted his decision immediately. Until God’s grace was taken from him, he didn’t know how much it had filled him up and been a part of him.

Nara would be no solace, she never would be. He was alone.

Without God.

Without Calise.

As emptiness and cold consumed him, he pounded on the bathroom door with both fists.

Too late.

The baby stopped crying abruptly, and Abaddon reappeared, alone.

“What have I done?” Shane abhorred himself. He was a fallen angel. For what?

Chapter 7

Calise savored her lunch with Ron, then went directly back to her bungalow. She paced back and forth.
Lucas and Carmen are different, like me. They know something is going on.
Should I tell them about Anna? About what happened? The flood of memories assaulted her. Could Anna be a demon? Were people who exposed demons murdered, like Juan Torres? Even if Carmen validated it all, then what? Cancel her psychiatrist appointment and figure this all out back in the States? Alone?

Her gut told her to trust Carmen and Lucas. Even though her heart never doubted the feelings she lived with, her mind kept telling her none of it was possible.

She barely touched the dinner she later ordered in her room. She headed for Carmen’s restaurant as soon as it closed, armed with only a flashlight, picking her way carefully down the steep road from Ron’s resort to Main Street under the glow of stars and moonlight. She worried what animals or monsters watched her from the trees sandwiching the deserted road. The drone of insects punctuated with the creak of crickets drowned out her sandals crunching in the dirt.

A branch snapped in the brush. She whipped her flashlight toward the noise. Eyes stared back at her. Her heart thumped wildly. Stogey bounded out of the bushes, wagging his fluffy tail and whining for attention.

“Holy crap, dog. You scared me.” She paused on the road to let the pounding of her heart subside. Stogey trotted alongside her the rest of the way, and she welcomed his company.

The roar of the ocean and the smell of the sea mingled with the thick scents of the jungle at night. As she approached the restaurant, she glanced at Lucas’s hut shrouded in darkness and practically camouflaged by palm trees. Following the sound of music, she ducked through the entrance of Carmen’s and found the owner sitting at a candlelit table, next to a jukebox playing Elvis’s
Devil in Disguise
.

Calise eased herself into the chair opposite her.

Carmen slid a mojito in her direction.

“Subtle.” Calise pointed a thumb at the jukebox.

“Long live the king.” Carmen leaned back and crossed her arms, looking more like she was about to interrogate Calise than converse. “So, what do you think you know?”

Might as well start at the beginning. “Please hear me out. Ever since I was a little girl, I could sense things about certain people, like a life force. Some people are calming, some chilling. It’s like there’s an invisible force field around them I can’t see—but I can feel.” She risked a look at Carmen, whose poker face revealed nothing, neither belief nor disbelief. “Am I making any sense?”

“Yes, my child. But what’s that have to do with Mal Pais?”

“Your cousin came into my pharmacy a few days ago. Something happened, like invisible friction between him and a drug addict. Juan Torres told me demons were everywhere, and the only person who could help him, or me, was his cousin, Carmen in Mal Pais. He was murdered.”

Carmen widened her eyes but said nothing.

“When I met Anna, I knew something was off. She oozes sex but in a vile way. She talked about wanting Lucas. Then I saw her—I saw her with a married man. She’d seduced him. And twice I could have sworn her eyes…were red.” Calise exhaled. “I tried to tell Lucas, but…”

Carmen lifted her drink and took a long, deliberate sip. “What do you believe?”

“I believe there could be angels and demons among us, and I’m sick of walking through life in black and white when there is color. I’m not afraid of the truth, I’m afraid of leaving here without it.”

Carmen’s features softened, like a mother trying to explain to her child Santa Claus isn’t real. She reached for Calise’s hands and grasped them tight. “You are a precious and beautiful soul. You’re completely sane, never doubt that. Believe what your heart tells you, and it’ll lead you to the truth. But be warned, some truths lead to more questions.” Carmen released her hands and stood up. She collected their glasses and headed for the kitchen. “Good-night, dear.”

“Wait! I need answers! You haven’t told me anything.” Calise shoved back her chair and stood up.

Carmen paused at the swinging door to her kitchen and turned around. “I have told you more than I’ve ever told anyone. And I never promised you answers. Now go home and be safe.”

She disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Calise alone in the night.

****

Entrance to Cabo Blanco Nature Reserve

After a few fitful hours sleep, Lucas got up and returned on foot to Cabo Blanco well before sunrise the next morning. Upon hearing voices near the entrance to the park, he hid and listened. Four people lingered by the entrance.

The stars and moonlight revealed an older demon couple and a young demon woman and transitor both around his age. He’d never encountered a transitor before, only heard about them and their gray auras. Lucas assumed this one had fallen since demons wouldn’t hang out with a transitor who might be on his way up.

He figured being a transitor would be the equivalent to purgatory—not up, not down, just trapped in the middle, holding a ticking time bomb. Like his father’s old cuckoo clocks, without God’s hand to rewind them, in a year they stopped ticking.
Poof. Gone.

Lucas hoped this guy would make a good decision, and quick. He waited to see how they’d be denied entrance to Alejandro’s “consecrated ground.”

The young woman spoke first. “You had this on good information, Dad? Since when are Paymon and Nicor reliable? I don’t get the sense that there’s anything here.” She entered the park.

The transitor waltzed through the entrance after her. “Wait up, Nara.”

The older couple stopped cold.

“Fuck me, Ronwe,” the man said to his wife, “this place is consecrated
and
guarded!” He motioned to the girl. “Nara, get out of there! We have to turn around.”

The daughter paused to look at her father then fell to the ground, lifeless. The transitor
ran to her. The older man yelled, “Pick her up! Get her out of there!”

The transitor rushed to lift her up and carry her back to the man. Once off the park proper, she gasped and her eyes fluttered open. “What’s wrong with her Abaddon?”

Lucas edged closer.

“These consecrated places can kill us,” the older demon said. “Forget about going in! We’ll lure the angel out and kill
him
.”

Lucas had heard enough.

****

When he finally got back to Carmen, woke her up, and told her everything he’d witnessed, she paled and poured them both shots of tequila.

“
Dios Mío.
” Oh my God.

“Tía, talk to me.”

Carmen went back to the bar for the entire bottle. “I suppose it’s time you knew. Our family descends from Nicodemus. Ever heard of him?”

“Nicodemus from the Bible?” He stared at her, trying to comprehend.